Strange problem with banking/roll

[pier39lab 0]

Hey guys,

I'm sorry if this was posted previously by someone else but I did spend quite a while googling trying to find what I was trying to say but I'm thinking I wasn't right on the keywords.

Anyways, I haven't had too much experience with MS FS.

 

Problem: When I bank or roll to a degree (no aircraft specific), the aircraft just holds on to that degree of bank even after I let go of the control column (I use a Saitek yoke) instead of just rolling back to Zero. Now, I know it's this fly by wire thing on the airbus but no I'm not flying an airbus, I manual flew a PMDG 737NGX and a Cessna 172 to double check it wasn't just on the 737ngx.

I hope you get the drift. This shouldn't happen, I fly real planes so I know this shouldn't be happening. I'm having a hardtime manual instrument- flying. What's the deal? Do I need to change a serious setting in the FSX?

 

 

Thanks.

[ramprat 8]

Hi there,

 

I don't know if I fully understand your problem. As I understand your post, the aircraft is holding the bank after you neutralize the bank command on the yoke. That is what it should do. But you stated you fly real planes, so you know that. So you might mean the rate of roll remains the same after you neutralize the command? At any rate, what caught my eye was the Saitek Yoke. I also own the Saitek Yoke. I found the Saitek Yoke to be one flawed mess and Saitek support was no help at all. Currently my Saitek Yoke is used as a connection hub for the TQ that comes with it. I don't use it as a flight control. But, if you are having a problem with all airplanes in FSX wanting to roll one way or the other without your input (mine was to the left) you can disconnect the yoke at the USB hub and then reconnect it and that should fix it for a while....until it does it again. The Saitek Yoke is also famous for phantom button presses. You might have a phantom button press coming from the Saitek Yoke that FSX is reading as a control function related to bank or yaw. If so, those can be edited out with a paid version of FSUIPC. But I finally gave up fighting with the darn thing. And, I should add, my yoke is about three years old, so they might have addressed the problems by now.

 

Hope that helps some.

[pier39lab 0]

Ok, lemme try and see if I can explain better :) Looking the flaws of the Saitek, they probably only existed on the older ones and they now have been taken care of, specially the Phantom button presses. I bought mine less than a year ago, so I don't think it's that bad now.

 

Let's see, so I'm flying an airplane using the Yoke, I bank to about 30 degrees (whatever side), now if I let go of the control column, the plane will just sit there at the banked angle (30 deg) forever, instead of eventually rolling wings level to neutralize.

[RustyFlyer 182]

I do not use the Saitek yoke (I use a joystick), however, from what you describe, your yoke returns the ailerons to a neutral positon when you let go of it. As Bill intimated, once you return the ailerons to their neutral postion after having banked an airplane, the airplane will *more or less* remain in that banked condition/orientation. When you think about it, it is logical and makes sense: you had to move the ailerons from a neutral postion in order to change its orientation from a straight and level condition to a banked one. Thus, if all you do is return the ailerons from the banking orientation to their neutral one, what will make the plane return to a straight and level condition? Answer: Essentially nothing. (Now, there are factors that will mitigate this, but for purposes of this thread, really, nothing.) Thus, to return the airplane to its straight and level orientation, the plane, in a sense, needs to be actively banked back in the opposite direction. That means that the ailerons (the yoke, really) will need to be, not just returned to their neutral position, but, in fact turned to the opposite direction to return the plane back to straight and level before the yoke can be held in the neutral positon. In a sense, the airplane actually needs to be 're-banked' back to return it back to the s&l state. One holds an already-entered bank, mostly, with the ailerons in a neutral position, not in a banking one.

 

Hope this helps! Rusty

[Chock 17,769]

You would need an inherently stable aircraft with a big dihedral for the aircraft to roll back to wings level without any control inputs after it had been placed into a banked turn. Once banked, and with the lift vector now somewhat off to one side, depending on trim and speed, it might just circle around in an uncoordinated slipping turn, or more likely it would eventually drop its nose and go into a descending turn, having lost some of the vertical lift component, which might end up in a spiral dive. You will need to roll it back to wings level yourself.

 

Al

[FLEX1978 373]

What 'real planes' do you fly?

 

Regards

[pier39lab 0]

Guys, thanks an ocean for your wonderful inputs. Everyone here has made a lot of aerodynamic sense. I'm sure there was definitely something wrong with my understanding plus some control sensivity settings so I had to trial and error. Now it's been behaving absolutely fine! I had some issues with the graphics, it was laggy as hell (this made it twice as hard to fly) even on a decent graphic card so I got some tweaks off a lot of googling and ever since it's been running smooth.

 

I got a CPL couple years go (trained mostly on cessna 152, 172 and PA-34) and bought a type rating on the 737NG six months ago and looking for a job. Since I am little rusty on the manual flying, I bought the PMDG 737NGX and wondered if it behaved as expected, it sure does!

 

Regards.

[Chock 17,769]

Glad you got it figured out, although to be brutally honest, if you have a commercial rating and managed to get one without demonstrating an understanding the basics of lift vectors, then I'm glad I did not learn to fly at the place you did.

 

Al