Not quite a GA question, but often when I fly in an airliner as a passenger the turns seem out of balance. I know unbalanced turns in small aircraft are meant to be more uncomfortable in the back, but is it possible for turns to feel co-ordinated only at one point along the length of the cabin? Presumably it’s at the CoG that you actually want to be coordinated and not the cockpit.
My first thought is that the radius of the turns should be far too large for it to make a difference… In which case why should the back seat of a pa28 be less comfortable?
That seems unlikely. A rough calculation shows that in a standard rate turn at low speed (worst case — 170 knots, say) even if you are sitting in a 60 m long aircraft (e.g. A330) the direction of the centripetal force would differ between the GC point and the extreme rear or front by not much more than one degree.
kwlf that is an interesting comment. For anything that is a Dash 8, CRJ, 737, A320 (or above) I have thought to myself that they were always very coordinated. I used to fly in and out of Vancouver (as a passenger) at least once a week and it is not uncommon that they do a last minute dodge from the approach on one parallel runway to the approach on the other. These are low level 30 degree banked turns and I often felt pushed ‘straight’ into my seat, i.e. perfectly coordinated.
However, I have found that there is often a lot of tail wagging in the Beech 1900, Metro-liner, and Kingair sized aircraft. Not really ‘uncoordinated’ flight, but more just the need for a yaw damper, or a pilot with yaw damping feet :-).
In addition to the length of the airframe, this might reflect differences in pilot skill though. In Canada, I think it is uncommon for a pilot to fly with the major airlines with less than 5000 hours (even as a co-pilot). Consequently, the younger pilots (say 1500 to 5000) hours are flying the smaller airplanes and honing their finesse before moving up.
As opposed to the UK/Europe where you come out of a ATPL machine and into the right hand seat of a jet at 200 hours :-)….
kwlf wrote:
often when I fly in an airliner as a passenger the turns seem out of balance
Canuck wrote:
For anything that is a Dash 8, CRJ, 737, A320 (or above) I have thought to myself that they were always very coordinated
These aircraft are invariably flown on the autopilot except for t/o & ldg(and the occasional visual approach although unfortunately these are increasingly being prohibited by Co. sops) and the requirement for coordinated rudder use is designed out(differential aileron, yaw dampers etc).
When flying these types the main use of rudder is for asymmetric flight(engine failure). With the Dash 8 power changes require considerable use of the rudder trim, so you may notice an occasional wag if done in a ham-fisted way…The idea of coordinating the turn with rudder input does not really exist.Thanks for the thoughts… Today’s flight was in an a318 and the out-of-balance turns were most noticeable shortly after take-off. Nothing terrible, just less co-ordinated than I thought it might have been. Perhaps more noticeable on the onset of turns than whilst sustained.
This thread is always at the top of my ‘mine’ page stating that it has a new post, despite me repeatedly looking at it to see if there is anything new, which there isn’t. This is partly an experiment to see whether I can exorcise whichever bug is making it do that, and partly to see whether anybody knows what’s making it do that?
The bug seems to be exorcised.
kwlf wrote:
The bug seems to be exorcised.
That’s because you yourself wrote in the thread! There is a bug such that if you have not read the last post of thread and that post is deleted by the moderator (or moved, I guess), then the “new” flag will get stuck until there is another post and you read that one.
AA is right; that bug is still there. A new post, by a spammer, was deleted by mods.
What happened here is that we got a subtle and cunning and potentially nasty hack, from a Singapore IP, whereby somebody joined up, and copied/pasted the first post in the thread, so the text of the post was all plausible “aviation English stuff”. Only thing he changed was making the question mark into a live link, pointing to some site which was presumably dodgy (I did not check it; you need a throwaway VM installation, preferably on a throwaway computer, to do that 100% safely). This can be dodgy because some “modern” browsers will prefetch the contents of links even if you don’t click on the link. In fact I didn’t spot the dodgy post for several hours (I was travelling) and it looks like nobody else did either since nobody pressed the Report button.
Last night we implemented significant new safeguards.
kwlf wrote:
in an a318 the out-of-balance turns were most noticeable shortly after take-off
Different aircraft, but on my 300hp single, when flying a left-hand circuit after take-off I had to apply RIGHT rudder in the climbing left-hand turn… sustained right rudder always!
But, seat of the pants is notoriously unreliable. Have you tried an iPhone app that measures acceleration?
