hand flying tips for hevies

[rwy12 16]

Hi allI have just started to experiment hand flying the pmdg 747.I was wondering if many people try this and if they have any tips/ideas on how to perform general manoeuvre.I find it very hard to keep on the heading-course deviation of 1 or 2 degree happens every few seconds and I am constantly trying to keep on course-is this normal?When making a turn I always lose some altitude-do real pilots use lots of rudder when making turns?These are just some of the difficulties I have come across-I am looking forward to hearing from people who try hand flying the heavies .I am looking for tips for tips on how to stay on course and how best to make turns.Looking forward to your views. ThanksQas

[vonmar 124]

Qas,MSFS tutor starts out in the Cessna. Turns with altitude control.Larger aircraft ... well, trim it up good, easy throttles, slower speed a little more rudder, higher speeds a little less and constant small corrections at all speeds.A go place to test would be VHHX (Hong Kong ILS13). This approach includes a right turn to final with a real coordinated descending turn!

[Paul Golding 92]

I've always been told that using the rudder in normal flight with an airliner is basically never done; in fact with many aircraft it's actually dangerous. Between take-off and the last few feet before a crosswind touchdown, the rudders don't have a use.It's be nice to hear from some real world airline pilots on this though.As for the loss of alt; keep away from the rudder, add a little power (turns cause a speed loss which will translate to alt loss unless corrected), add a little back pressure and trim it.On the plus side, it's nice to hear somebody is "flying" an airliner instead of playing with the AP all the time.

[brian747 5]

Hi Qas!I can recommend the PMDG Type Rating tutorials 1 - 4. Get them hereCheers,Brian

[microlight 0]

Real world pilot here. (Well, for a Piper Warrior anyway!)Rudder is definitely used in flight, depending on the amount of turn rate/bank you're looking for. While a gentle turn can be done with ailerons alone, a 'medium turn' at a steeper bank angle requires coordination of rudder, ailerons and elevators due to the loss of lift (not speed) during a steep turn.Try adjusting the rudder trim in the 747 if you find yourself moving away from the heading every few seconds. (The Piper doesn't have rudder trim; you have to correct for wind using the rudder pedals.) This will compensate for the drift in the same way that elevator trim compensates for the tendency to climb or descend depending on configuration.Hope this helps.;)

[CoolP 283]

Going on airliners with Yaw Dampers on will give you nice coordinated turns without using any rudder (just follow the indicators in your given cockpit - the "ball" stays in the middle when turning). In fact, you'll produce a skid or slip when going for manual rudder and therefor this technique is only used in crosswind landings or takeoffs. On all the other situations in flying an airliner, you use those pedals as footrests.I wouldn't call in dangerous if you do use some rudder because the modern systems won't disconnect the next second and they're able to judge if this action was intended by the pilot or comes from external influence and has to be counteracted.So you'll have to divide the real world guys into at least into two species: the ones with "coordinated" flight controls (e. g. Yaw Damper) and the ones without (usually older and/or smaller aircraft). Good airmanship of course means that you would be able to coordinate your aileron/rudder movement in a complete manual flight situation.Passenger comfort and safety together nowadays lead to the fact that turning your big bird is mainly done by pointing/banking him in the desired direction and to let those skid/slip corrections be made by the automated flight controls.Going into abnormal conditions might lead to disengagement of this equipment or the use of a turbulence mode, "grabbing" the runway angle with the wings level is also a common manual case, but the rest: no need to interfere. Using "rudder trim" is a different thing and is therefor never done via the pedals on an airliner.

[Guest sg38]

Hi allI have just started to experiment hand flying the pmdg 747.I was wondering if many people try this and if they have any tips/ideas on how to perform general manoeuvre.I find it very hard to keep on the heading-course deviation of 1 or 2 degree happens every few seconds and I am constantly trying to keep on course-is this normal?When making a turn I always lose some altitude-do real pilots use lots of rudder when making turns?These are just some of the difficulties I have come across-I am looking forward to hearing from people who try hand flying the heavies .I am looking for tips for tips on how to stay on course and how best to make turns.Looking forward to your views. ThanksQas

IRL, 'heavies' like the my 767 (and the 777/747) are basically very stable and course deviations usually don't happen.Maybe your wings aren't perfectly level? Then of course the heading starts to drift. If you turn with e.g. more than 15deg bank you need to keep the nose up with the elevator. Standard bank angle is 25deg.Try not to trim as you would need to re-trim when rolling of the turn.Rudder is never used and a thrust change during normal banked turns isn't needed either (assuming it isn't a looong 180deg turn.)

[Guest 413X3]

freight dogs don't believe in coordinated turns that make the ride easy on SLF (self loading freight)

[Chock 17,769]

When you turn, you have to bear in mind that what you are actually doing, is using some of the lift vector that would normally be keeping you up in the air in level flight, and transferring that sideways to affect a turn.By banking, you send some of that lifting force off to one side, which is what makes you commence turning, but it does not automatically make you turn in a coordinated fashion, instead making you slip sideways, so you will lose height for several reasons: First, some of your lifting force is now no longer pointing straight up, second, when you slip sideways, your fuselage blocks some of the airflow to the wing on the outside of the slip, which reduces the lift that wing is generating ever so slightly, third, your wing load increases when in a turn, so you have to fly faster in order to avoid stalling or getting near to a stall and losing height.This is why you typically use the rudder in an aircraft when turning (in a light aircraft), which effectively 'kicks' the tail to the outside of the turn (a bit like when a rally car drifts its back end out when sliding around a turn). That makes your nose point inwards to the direction you are turning, so both wings get full exposure to the oncoming airflow and you go around the turn in a nice radius, rather than simply slipping sideways into an inefficient and indeed uncomfortable turn where your passengers start reaching for the sick bags. Note too, that when banked over, the elevators are in fact slightly upright (because you are tilted over), so you can actually use the elevators as an impromptu rudder to some degree.But even in a nicely coordinated turn, you still have to compensate for the fact that less of your lift vector is pointing upwards, by either increasing speed so that you generate more lift and have some lift to spare (which will help you maintain height), or, you can pull back on the stick a little, to increase the angle of attack of the wings and generate more lift. But since generating more lift also means generating more drag, you will have to increase the throttle a little bit, in order to maintain the same speed you were at when in level flight. At steep bank angles, you will want more speed anyway because of point number three, i.e. the stall speed of your wings increases when you are banked over, because the wing loading increases in a banked turn. To understand that, you might want to check this link out:http://www.experimentalaircraft.info/flight-planning/aircraft-stall-speed-1.phpAirliners are invariably flown differently from light aircraft, because they have fancy systems which assist with flying the thing, so the piloting techniques often differ from those of light aircraft. Generally speaking, the rudder pedals are left well alone for most phases of flight in an airliner, or only used in a very minimal way. Even the autopilot doesn't use the rudder much, which incidentally, is why you have to manually use rudder trim on an airliner if you lose an engine, even when flying with the autopilot, since the autopilot will not compensate for the aysmetric thrust-induced yaw, because it invariably won't use the rudder (a Chinese-operated Boeing 747 almost crashed a few years ago, because the crew did not realise that was the case with the autopilot after they lost power on an outboard engine).The systems on board an airliner will keep you in coordinated flight when simply using the yoke much of the time, but it is not true to say that the rudder is never used, merely that it has to be used with caution if you do use it, which would probably only be on something such as at slow speeds in a crosswind landing. There is currently some debate over this with the FAA and EADS, as part of the ongoing investigation into the loss of American Airlines Flight 587, which was an Airbus A300 that crashed into Queens, New York, when the co-pilot kicked on full rudder first one way, and then the other, after flying through some wake turbulence, not realising that doing so would produce so much lateral force on the tailfin that it actually broke the entire tail assembly off the aeroplane, sending the airliner into a fatally uncontrollable dive.What 587's co-pilot did not realise, was that if you use repeated full control deflections at below Va (the theoretical maximum control deflection maneuvering speed of an aircraft) you can overload the aircraft structure, since at light loads, Va is considerably reduced, thus Va is not a constant, and Va is based on a full lateral shift in one direction, not the rapid deflection of the control from one limit then across to the other limit, which will overload the tail surface at much less than the known Va. The pilot training curriculum at American Airlines now covers this sort of thing, which it never used to, because in the case of Flight 587, if the co-pilot had simply left the rudder alone, the aircraft would have merely flown through the turbulence and then been fine. Prior to this, AA pilots had been trained to act aggressively when encountering any wake turbulence, so it was not really the co-pilot's fault, more the fault of AA for offering its pilots poor training and advice, however, AA still attribute the blame to EADS (even though the NTSB did not) and say their A300s should have been built tougher than they were (this is one of those things that regularly crops up thanks to the international vagaries of Annex 13, where several countries are involved in an air crash investigation, and usually end up trying to shift blame to the other country). It was Flight 587's loss and uninformed speculation that has led to doubts being cast over the tailfin assembly of Air France Flight AF447 (lost over the South Atlantic), with many poorly-informed comments about an inherent weakness in the Airbus coming from people who confused Va, with aggressive repeated control deflections in adverse conditions, but of course, we don't actually know what brought down AF447 anyway (most likely the storm itself), thus that might be a moot point anyway.Back on topic anyway, the good news is that typically in an airliner, you will merely have to keep the nose up in a manual turn and not worry too much about actually even using the rudder. Some of that depends on which mode of control you are using, and indeed which airliner you are flying, for example, a full-on fly-by-wire Airbus will simply stay pointing where you aim the thing with the stick in some FBW modes, then there are things such as CWS (control wheel steering) on Boeings, which is a bit like an 'autopilot assisted' manual control mode. There's none of that fancy stuff in your average Cessna spam can, so of course you will use the rudder more in one of those, not least for controlling the torque and gyroscopic effects from the prop, which are of course not issues on a jet airliner either.There's even more to this than I've noted here, for example, things such as adverse yaw and the fact that one wing is traveling faster than the other when you are in a turn, but the info above is probably enough to get you by for a flight sim.Al

[FLEX1978 373]

Never touch the rudder in any large aircraft unless decrabing during a crosswind or compensating for asymmetric thrust. There is absolutely no other reason in normal operations for it's use.So many strange myths in the flightsim world.

[Guest sg38]

Never touch the rudder in any large aircraft unless decrabing during a crosswind or compensating for asymmetric thrust. There is absolutely no other reason in normal operations for it's use.So many strange myths in the flightsim world.

Well I noticed that when you enter a turn in a rather 'sporty' way in the 767 that you DO need rudder to keep the ball centered.Similar for GA planes. If you roll VERY slowly and 'passenger friendly' into a turn, especially with differential aileron which increase drag on the 'correct' side, only very little, if any rudder at all is neccessary.Concering the AA A300, it should be noted that the vertical stab had been repaired after a severe turbulence encounter and that this was most probably a contributing factor.