How realistic is a flight sim joystick, do real aircraft self center?

I have the Hotas Wartog, a quality piece of kit for sure  however,  it is sprung and always brings itself back to the central centered position, there's even a little pause if it pushed over that position, do real aircraft do this?

I have thought about removing the spring altogether as per several videos on YouTube, any comments for and against this approach please?

 

Thanks

Phil

Hi Phil,

There are no springs in real aircraft - at least in the SEL GA variety - so when on the ground my yoke sits all the way forward against the stops as the weight of the stabilator forces it there - if I pull it all the way back and let go - it would slam the stops pretty hard... Forces might be less with a true elevator as it's a smaller control surface ? That said once you open the throttle or when you're flying - the wind will force the yoke into a neutral position (pitch and bank) and it will feel very spring like - as it will always want to go back to neutral - providing it's trimmed properly...

Regards,

Scott

Edited August 12, 20196 yr by scottb613

I can't comment specifically on any Hotas hardware, but what is not realistic with many flight sim yokes is the detent in the centered postition. Real world yokes mostly self center as well as in coming back to the center position itself when you let go of them, but there is just no detent. Yokes with hall sensors instead of springs are more realistic. In real aircraft, yokes are also harder to move. Many flight sim yokes have little to no resistance, which I personally find makes it even harder to make precise inputs. You also don't get a realistic range of motion with many flight sim yokes. Mostly it's something like a 90° range for the aileron instead of 180°. Elevator movement is also limited most of the time.

Be careful with removing the spring. You'll most likely lose any warranty and even if some on YouTube have their yoke still working fine, I'm personally reluctant to do anything like this.

Edited August 12, 20196 yr by threegreen

As others have noted, the joysticks in most aeroplanes with traditional cables or pushrods connected to the control surfaces - i.e. the vast majority of GA aeroplanes, all gliders, and even some older airliners of 1930s and 40s vintage, will flop over to one of the stops when the thing is parked up and they will stay like that unless the wind blows the control surfaces about. This is in fact why most aeroplanes of that type have some sort of control locking mechanism, i.e. to prevent damage to either the cockpit controls or the control surface, which can occur as a result of being slapped about in the wind, which is why they are often referred to as 'gust locks'; these locking mechanisms either fit onto the actual control surfaces to lock them in place, or they will be some sort of bar, clip or latch in the cockpit which holds the stick and rudder bars immobile.

These days, such mechanisms will have some kind of prominent 'remove before flight' tag on them. That's one of the reasons why you do a walkaround check of your aeroplane and you also test the movement of the controls before you commence taxying, in order to ensure that any and all control locks have been removed. In some cases, ground crew will hold these locks and pins up, so the pilots can see they have been removed, as part of the wave off procedure prior to take off. You will see the headset guy doing this when an airliner is pushed back just after the tug and bar are disconnected.

Below you can see me with the rudder control lock which I've just removed from the tail of the SZD 50-3 glider which I am walking past prior to getting into the thing That control lock just slips right over the top of the fin and stops the rudder from blowing about. You might be able to just make out that the port aileron is down slightly; this is probably because the control column has flopped forward in the cockpit owing to the weight of the elevator and then rocked over a bit to the right hand side, causing a slight application of right aileron because the thing is leaning over on its starboard wingtip. Of note in this pic is that unlike with most powered GA aeroplanes, I am wearing a parachute; this is because the seat is designed to take one and there is a little more risk of collisions in gliders when they're all going for the same bit of sky where there is some good lift, so it's not a bad idea to have one anyway. You'll also notice that I've put my baseball cap on backwards to prevent the peak obscuring my vision, since with gliders flying about all over the place not under any form of ATC, I need to keep a lookout for other aircraft in the area in order to avoid the chance of a collision.

There have been several accidents in the past where crews forgot to check such control locks were removed, perhaps most famously, with the first prototype of the Boeing B-17 'Flying Fortress' - the Model 299. Having been taxied out to the runway with the elevator control locks still in place, it pitched up, stalled and crashed on its take off off roll, when carrying out its second United States Army Air Corps evaluation flight in 1935. The aircraft slammed back down into the ground and burst into flames, killing the Army test pilot at the controls and his Boeing co-pilot, also injuring others who were on board the aircraft for the evaluation flight. Since the crash had destroyed the prototype, the fledgling B-17 was eliminated from the competition for a new bomber, which led the USAAC to order the Douglas B-18 Bolo - also competing for the contract - instead, even though it was of course vastly inferior to the Boeing. Yeah I know, you never heard of the B-18, right? That's because it was rubbish and most of them were destroyed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and those which were not, were relegated to a training role. Fortunately, the USAAC were sufficiently impressed with the prototype B-17 to use a legal loophole to order 13 Mark 1 Boeing YB-17s anyway, and the rest is history.

The crashed Model 299 is shown in this pic:

Anyway, interesting history facts aside, what this all means is that normally the controls feel very loose to move about when you are sat motionless in an aeroplane (if you actually bother to check them, as you should), but pretty much the moment you start rolling, the aerodynamic forces acting on the control surfaces stiffen the feel of the control column up, so that by the time you have flying speed, there is typically a comfortably positive amount of resistance feel in the controls and they will stay more of less central and generally speaking, the spring on a joystick is there to replicate that feel, which it does a reasonably good job at managing.

Because of this, I would caution against removing the centering spring from a joystick, although what you can do if you like, is use some wire cutters to clip a couple of loops out of the spring if you feel it is a bit too strong at centering the stick (be careful if you do this, use proper wire cutters and preferably wear goggles and gloves too, and if you can, also secure it in a vice whilst doing this kind of surgery; there is a lot of potential energy in a spring and if it flies out of your grip, it could easily cut your hand or get you in the eye).

Some of how much strength you want to have for the self-centering of a stick will depend on what you fly too. For example, the Messerschmitt bf109 was somewhat infamous for having incredibly strong aerodynamic loads imparted on its control surfaces at even fairly moderate speeds, even requiring two hands on the stick in order to move it when diving at very high speeds; this was not helped by the fact that the 109's cockpit is very narrow, so there wasn't a lot of elbow room to allow the pilot to get some leverage on the thing. Early Spitfires (with fabric covered ailerons) were noted for this drawback too, until these were replaced by metal-covered ailerons in 1941 on the later variants such as the Mark V and Mark IX, which is among the many reasons why most people regard these as the 'best' Spitfires.

More recently, the Boeing 707 earned the nickname among its pilots of 'the lead sled', because in particular, the rudder was very hard to move when in flight, and really needed a good strong pair or thigh muscles on the rudder pedals to get it moving, although this wasn't actually a bad thing in some ways, as the initial models of the B707 had bolts which were not very strong holding the tail on, and it was possible to rip the entire tailplane off the thing if you actually could manage to apply full rudder deflections at high speeds (this actually happened more than once with disastrous results). The 707 underwent a modification to rectify this problem, but it is nevertheless entirely possible (on pretty much any aeroplane) to rip the tail off the thing if you give it full rudder when at high speeds, so you should never do that, and of course with flight sims, the spring on your joystick kind of gives you a hint about that sort of stuff!

So yeah, unless you have a fancy force-feedback stick, the centering spring is kind of a necessary to emulate the aerodynamic forces you feel on a control column.

Edited August 12, 20196 yr by Chock

Removing the centering spring and leaving the stick head to flop about with no return force really doesn't make sense to me...pretty much all flight control systems return to a centered position inflight, either due to aerodynamic forces, or via use of an artificial feel system that emulates the tactile feedback of control force loading.  A centering spring as is found in pretty much all computer flight joysticks is as close as you can expect to get to that behavior without the complexity of a *proper* force-feedback system...and I have yet to see a consumer-grade FF joystick that meets that description.

What you can do with the Warthog is replace the stock centering spring with one that yields a lighter or heavier feel...or you can add a stick extender, which adds throw distance and increases the mechanical advantage of the stick to, in effect, reduce spring pressure resistance at the stick head.

Also, the dead zone in the center of the stick's travel is a function of calibration, in the Thrustmaster TARGET software if you're using it, in the sim, or in a utility like FSUIPC (or perhaps several of these).  I manage that in FSUIPC exclusively (joystick axis disabled in the sim controls, no TARGET).  The dead zone is needed to ensure that a centered stick does not make unwanted nonzero inputs due to mechanical slop in the centering mechanism or noise/lack of precision in the position sensor.  The electronic and mechanical precision in the Warthog are sufficiently good to keep a very small, tight dead zone at the center.

Regards

Alan, you provided some very interesting insight and history.  Thanks very much!

John

Thanks everyone for your educated and insightful replies, it seems to be the consensus to leave the spring in place and I'll therefore take your advice.

I'll look into the stick extender idea and also the null zone options from within X-Plane.

And I'll try , really try to get over that central detente issue that bugs me.

Thanks again

Phil

Word from a real Airbus pilot is that the Hotas Wartog is the most close you have to an Airbus side stick, so grab that stick.

This is the guy BTW, great content.

 

 

Incidentally, there is a semi-restored Douglas B-18 Bolo  housed in the Museum at McChord AFB near Tacoma, Washington.  It was rebuilt from one that augered  in somewhere.  The museum also has a Douglas B-23 on display.  Another jewel from Douglas.  The B-23 wasn't much more successful than the B-18.

Gust locks are important, especially removing then before flight.  The Marine Corps lost a C-177 at Danang in the late 60s because the crew didn't remove them prior to takeoff.

Jim Driskell

So far in simulation the only moment where I would remove the springs would be for helicopter flying. Cyclic control ("the center stick") has no central position on most helo and it is an absolute PITA to fly more than 20-30 minutes with a helo in P3D without such a stick (since you have to push forward all the time).

6 hours ago, Chock said:

"Yeah I know, you never heard of the B-18, right? That's because it was rubbish and most of them were destroyed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and those which were not, were relegated to a training role. Fortunately, the USAAC were sufficiently impressed with the prototype B-17 to use a legal loophole to order 13 Mark 1 Boeing YB-17s anyway, and the rest is history."

 

 

" So the Japanese did the American's a favor (sort of).

Edited August 12, 20196 yr by Jude Bradley

The Thrustmaster HOTAS X (nice budget joystick and throttle combo which Alan reviewed incidentally!) has an adjustable screw tensioner on the underside of the joystick.

14 hours ago, HighBypass said:

The Thrustmaster HOTAS X (nice budget joystick and throttle combo which Alan reviewed incidentally!) has an adjustable screw tensioner on the underside of the joystick.

Hello,

Can you elaborate please as I don't see anything.

 

Thanks

Phil

1 hour ago, philmurfin said:

Hello,

Can you elaborate please as I don't see anything.

 

Thanks

Phil

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/4289418?gclsrc=aw.ds&&cmpid=GS001&_$ja=tsid:59158|acid:532-198-3455|cid:598901029|agid:24337525970|tid:pla-337721316849|crid:86937817730|nw:g|rnd:11756095639365773664|dvc:t|adp:1o2|mt:|loc:9045623&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5f_v4YOA5AIVibPtCh0MgAiVEAQYAiABEgIOGPD_BwE

also - Al's review of the TM HOTAS X, apologies, Phil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDvFQb5MNRM&t=2s