Tweaking the throttle on approach

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:54:41 -0400, Ron Natalie
wrote:

Mxsmanic wrote:

A flight in the sim takes the same time as its real-life counterpart, though.

Bull****. I don't have to preflight the simulator, or pull it from the
hangar, or preheat it, or get it started, or call for the fuel truck
or any of the hundred things that REAL pilots have to deal with with
flying REAL airplanes that you'll never experience in your pathetic
little fantasy world. Don't lecture real pilots (or those who are
attempting to become real pilots) from your distorted self-interested
masturbation.

You missed a rough run-up where you make the go-nogo decision, the
taxi back to the hangar, wait for the engine to cool enough to handle
the plugs which are almost impossible to get at, then spend the better
part of another hour cleaning the lead out of the plugs. (Did that
last week)

I think so. If you can learn all the complex and HP stuff _eventually_, then
that also means that you can learn it right up front. It might seem more
daunting at first than a simple aircraft, but the overall elapsed time to
become proficient in the complex aircraft would be the same in both
situations.

Again you have no clue. The some of the time will be longer as
you waste time initially being behind the complex aircraft which will
entail more instruction time than if you started simple and worked up.
After you get competence in the simple aircraft, adding the control of
the complex is trivial.

It even confuses a pilot with many hundreds of hours in a 172 or
Cherokee. :-)) Like many things it's easy once you've done it, or it
looks easy if you haven't.


On a high wing aircraft, the fuel system is gravity fed, and you have
a fuel selector with L / R / Both choices. Leave it on Both and
you're set.

Sounds good to me.

It shouldn't. If you bothered to study anything, the above isn't valid
for even Cessnas. Cessna recommends operating in LEFT or RIGHT at
high altitudes. I'm not going to go into the reasons because your
game doesn't vapor lock.


Low wing aircraft (Cherokee specifically) do not have a Both option.
You have Left or Right, and it's up to the pilot to manage his fuel.
For instance, you start on least full tank, switch to fullest before
takeoff. Every 30 minutes, for instance, you need to switch tanks, or
risk a weight imbalance, or at worst, engine failure due to fuel
starvation.

Wow ... sounds incredibly primitive. I guess crossfeeds and stuff like that
are still future science-fiction for small aircraft.

I wonder what he thinks of a plane where you have to pump gas from
front to back in flight to keep the CG where you want it?. Primitive?
:-))


No more science fiction than your pathetic brain. My aircraft is a low
wing and has a both position on the fuel selector and tip tank
crossfeeds for a long time. But it adds weight, complexity and things
that may go wrong just as easily as forgetting to switch tanks.

In a twin, though, you have one tank per engine, so you should be able to feed
the right engine with the right tank, and the left with the left tank.

Again, your pathatic idealized world doesn't correspond to reality. Do
you think the fuel flow on each engine is identical? Do you think the
line guy filled both tanks to the same level?

And then look at all the tanks they have in a modern airliners.


I've gotten pretty low in the tanks in the Baron and I've never had to switch
tanks. The only time I've ever had to touch it was for engine failure, in
which case I obviously direct both tanks to the non-failing engine.

You've never flown a baron. Stop lying. Real pilots who haven't caught
on to your bull**** and lies might be dangerously confused.

Or just dangerous.


Point taken. But I have read that it's good practice to keep plenty of fuel
in the tanks when possible, not only to maximum your reserves but also to help
exclude condensation (I guess small aircraft haven't discovered airtight seals
yet, either).

Again your pathetic ignorance is showing. If you bothered to actually
study things rather than basing the entire world on what you can observe
of Microsoft's simplification of flight you'd know that:

1. The tanks can't be sealed. As fuel goes out, air must go in (either
that or you'll have to have fuel tanks like a playtex baby bottle with
a collapsing bladder.

2. Condensation rarely is the problem. The real problem is poorly
sealing fuel caps.

I took off one day when one of the "old" or maybe I should say *OLD* O
rings let go. Man, It looked like a contrail, but it was nothing
compared to the day when I did a short field TO and rotated abruptly
at the intersection of our two runways which is considerably higher
than the the rest of 18/38. The filler caps were getting tired on the
tip tanks and they both let go at the same instant. Those 15 gallon
tanks were *dry* after just going around and staying in tight. They
were probably dry by the time I turned cross wind.


Interesting. Full flaps on the Baron do create a lot of drag, but the
"approach" setting creates far less. It's a poor speedbrake--the gear works
better for that (but has a lower maximum speed). When I extend the flaps in
the Baron, I rise very noticeably, then I slow down significantly and I start
to lose altitude; with full flaps, there's a noticeable tendency to pitch
down, too. But I'm expecting all this so I adjust for it.

Again, stop lying. You've never flown a Baron. You don't know how
they behave aerdodynamically.


Is it a good aircraft? I've heard stories about Pipers.

Stories is all you've heard about anything.

How far above the runway? And you don't stall or get a tail strike?

Neither. If you bothered to learn something about ground handling in
wind you'd know these things. It's the first thing that REAL pilots
do in an airplane.


In the Baron I don't think I've ever pulled the yoke all the way back. I stay
almost level until I'm very close indeed to the runway, then pull back on
power a bit and flare. No idle and no full back stick, though. I haven't
actually tried that, but from the way the Baron behaves my intuition tells me
it wouldn't be suitable.

You've never flown a Baron, and you've never pulled a real yoke back.

I heard that you run out of elevator authority if you get too slow but
that's only a guess...

Possibly. I'm usually at least 10 kts above stall speed so I don't really
know (or maybe you are not talking about a Baron?).

Maybe he's talking about a real Baron and not your pathetic fantasy.
'
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

It's worth remembering that once basic aircraft control, navigation,
and communication are taught, most of the flight instruction one gets
for PP or IR is related to dealing with what I'll call adverse events.
We had been taught how to recognize instrument failure and what to do
about it, engine failure and what to do about it, pilot error and what
to do about it, getting into an unusual attitude and what to do about
it, what the airplane feels like and might do if we're close to an
edge (too low and too slow because the low level wind is much greater
than expected because it's a first gust on final comes to mind) -- the
list goes on and on. If one sets 'realism' to high in a sim, does one
get those kinds of failures as often as they might happen with a
general aviation aircraft? Does the weather go marginal, does ice grow
on the wings, vac pumps fail, those sort of things that most of us who
have been pilots for a few hundred hours have experienced?

Oh? you can get them in a sim if you program them in? Actual airplanes
do allow us to simulate emergencies, but in real life sometimes it's
not a simulation.


On Mar 16, 2:34 am, Roger wrote:
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:54:41 -0400, Ron Natalie
wrote:

Mxsmanic wrote:

A flight in the sim takes the same time as its real-life counterpart, though.

Bull****. I don't have to preflight the simulator, or pull it from the
hangar, or preheat it, or get it started, or call for the fuel truck
or any of the hundred things that REAL pilots have to deal with with
flying REAL airplanes that you'll never experience in your pathetic
little fantasy world. Don't lecture real pilots (or those who are
attempting to become real pilots) from your distorted self-interested
masturbation.

You missed a rough run-up where you make the go-nogo decision, the
taxi back to the hangar, wait for the engine to cool enough to handle
the plugs which are almost impossible to get at, then spend the better
part of another hour cleaning the lead out of the plugs. (Did that
last week)



I think so. If you can learn all the complex and HP stuff _eventually_, then
that also means that you can learn it right up front. It might seem more
daunting at first than a simple aircraft, but the overall elapsed time to
become proficient in the complex aircraft would be the same in both
situations.

Again you have no clue. The some of the time will be longer as
you waste time initially being behind the complex aircraft which will
entail more instruction time than if you started simple and worked up.
After you get competence in the simple aircraft, adding the control of
the complex is trivial.

It even confuses a pilot with many hundreds of hours in a 172 or
Cherokee. :-)) Like many things it's easy once you've done it, or it
looks easy if you haven't.







On a high wing aircraft, the fuel system is gravity fed, and you have
a fuel selector with L / R / Both choices. Leave it on Both and
you're set.

Sounds good to me.

It shouldn't. If you bothered to study anything, the above isn't valid
for even Cessnas. Cessna recommends operating in LEFT or RIGHT at
high altitudes. I'm not going to go into the reasons because your
game doesn't vapor lock.

Low wing aircraft (Cherokee specifically) do not have a Both option.
You have Left or Right, and it's up to the pilot to manage his fuel.
For instance, you start on least full tank, switch to fullest before
takeoff. Every 30 minutes, for instance, you need to switch tanks, or
risk a weight imbalance, or at worst, engine failure due to fuel
starvation.

Wow ... sounds incredibly primitive. I guess crossfeeds and stuff like that
are still future science-fiction for small aircraft.

I wonder what he thinks of a plane where you have to pump gas from
front to back in flight to keep the CG where you want it?. Primitive?
:-))



No more science fiction than your pathetic brain. My aircraft is a low
wing and has a both position on the fuel selector and tip tank
crossfeeds for a long time. But it adds weight, complexity and things
that may go wrong just as easily as forgetting to switch tanks.

In a twin, though, you have one tank per engine, so you should be able to feed
the right engine with the right tank, and the left with the left tank.

Again, your pathatic idealized world doesn't correspond to reality. Do
you think the fuel flow on each engine is identical? Do you think the
line guy filled both tanks to the same level?

And then look at all the tanks they have in a modern airliners.



I've gotten pretty low in the tanks in the Baron and I've never had to switch
tanks. The only time I've ever had to touch it was for engine failure, in
which case I obviously direct both tanks to the non-failing engine.

You've never flown a baron. Stop lying. Real pilots who haven't caught
on to your bull**** and lies might be dangerously confused.

Or just dangerous.







Point taken. But I have read that it's good practice to keep plenty of fuel
in the tanks when possible, not only to maximum your reserves but also to help
exclude condensation (I guess small aircraft haven't discovered airtight seals
yet, either).

Again your pathetic ignorance is showing. If you bothered to actually
study things rather than basing the entire world on what you can observe
of Microsoft's simplification of flight you'd know that:

1. The tanks can't be sealed. As fuel goes out, air must go in (either
that or you'll have to have fuel tanks like a playtex baby bottle with
a collapsing bladder.

2. Condensation rarely is the problem. The real problem is poorly
sealing fuel caps.

I took off one day when one of the "old" or maybe I should say *OLD* O
rings let go. Man, It looked like a contrail, but it was nothing
compared to the day when I did a short field TO and rotated abruptly
at the intersection of our two runways which is considerably higher
than the the rest of 18/38. The filler caps were getting tired on the
tip tanks and they both let go at the same instant. Those 15 gallon
tanks were *dry* after just going around and staying in tight. They
were probably dry by the time I turned cross wind.







Interesting. Full flaps on the Baron do create a lot of drag, but the
"approach" setting creates far less. It's a poor speedbrake--the gear works
better for that (but has a lower maximum speed). When I extend the flaps in
the Baron, I rise very noticeably, then I slow down significantly and I start
to lose altitude; with full flaps, there's a noticeable tendency to pitch
down, too. But I'm expecting all this so I adjust for it.

Again, stop lying. You've never flown a Baron. You don't know how
they behave aerdodynamically.

Is it a good aircraft? I've heard stories about Pipers.

Stories is all you've heard about anything.

How far above the runway? And you don't stall or get a tail strike?

Neither. If you bothered to learn something about ground handling in
wind you'd know these things. It's the first thing that REAL pilots
do in an airplane.

In the Baron I don't think I've ever pulled the yoke all the way back. I stay
almost level until I'm very close indeed to the runway, then pull back on
power a bit and flare. No idle and no full back stick, though. I haven't
actually tried that, but from the way the Baron behaves my intuition tells me
it wouldn't be suitable.

You've never flown a Baron, and you've never pulled a real yoke back.

I heard that you run out of elevator authority if you get too slow but
that's only a guess...

Possibly. I'm usually at least 10 kts above stall speed so I don't really
know (or maybe you are not talking about a Baron?).

Maybe he's talking about a real Baron and not your pathetic fantasy.
'

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)www.rogerhalstead.com- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Tony writes:

If one sets 'realism' to high in a sim, does one
get those kinds of failures as often as they might happen with a
general aviation aircraft?

Simulators (including MSFS) usually allow failures to be adjusted
independently of overall realism. So you can have anything from a 100%
reliable aircraft to one that experiences multiple catastrophic failures even
before pushback. Many types of failures are so impractical or dangerous to
practice in real life that they can only be experienced safely and
economically in a simulator.

Does the weather go marginal, does ice grow
on the wings, vac pumps fail, those sort of things that most of us who
have been pilots for a few hundred hours have experienced?

This is also controllable in a sim.

Oh? you can get them in a sim if you program them in?

It's a parameter setting rather than a programming problem.

Actual airplanes
do allow us to simulate emergencies, but in real life sometimes it's
not a simulation.

The most critical emergencies cannot be practiced outside of a simulator,
because they are too dangerous or expensive. You either learn to handle them
in a simulator, or you don't learn to handle them.

Airline pilots practice engine failures regularly in simulators, even though
most of them will never see a real-world engine failure during their careers.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Roger writes:

I wonder what he thinks of a plane where you have to pump gas from
front to back in flight to keep the CG where you want it?. Primitive?

The Concorde was a special case, although it was primitive by today's
standards.

And then look at all the tanks they have in a modern airliners.

And the increasing automation in their management.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.