Ken Duffey wrote:

Guy Alcala wrote:
Max Richter wrote:


Hallo,
i know that French;Italian and Japanese airplanes prior and in WW2 had
an opostite throttlemovement than British;American and German airplanes.

I mean that to increase power you had to pull the Throttle backwards and
not forward.
Now i asumed that after WW2 with the availability of surplus British and
American planes to the mentioned countrys this habit was not longer
followed.
Now i read that the French got T28 in the early sixties and modified
them to the COIN-configeration and the reversal of the
throttlequadrantmovement was one of the mentioned modifikations.
Now my question: have Mirages or Rafales or any other airplanes this
oddity also.


I asked an IAF pilot about this some years ago. He'd flown Ouragans, dual
Mirages and Kfirs (the majority of his combat time was in A-4s). He said
they and theVautour all had standard (forward = increased throttle)
movement. The same was presumably true of Mysteres and Super Mysteres, but
hehad npo personal experience.

Guy


Wasn't the wing sweep lever on the F-111 changed early in its
development programme??

IIRC, the engineers designed it so that, moved forward, the wings swept
back (to go faster, same as throttle), moved back, the wings swept
forward (to slow down - same as throttle).

The early test pilots insisted it be changed to a 'natural' movement -
back to sweep the wings back, forward to sweep them forward.

Or was it the other way round ???

The wing sweep control (aka the Trombone handle) of the production a/c pulled
back to sweep the wings back, and forward to sweep them forward; even so, it
wasn't an intuitive design, and labelling the extremes FWD and AFT really didn't
help. Bill Gunston, in his ARCO book on the F-111, says that at least three
experienced pilots, including one company test pilot, got it wrong with serious
consequences. He wrote that it's mildly amazing that 40 years after a/c controls
began to be designed to resemble the system they were controlling to avoid
errors, no one insisted on having a small 'wing' mounted on the cockpit side,
which would be moved in exactly the same direction as you wanted the real one to,
and which a single glance at would eliminate any possible confusion.

Guy