Hi

I am using the default Cessna Caravan a lot but have found that it appears to have too much lift. With the flaps set, when it reaches 75 knots on the runway it lifts off the ground without any movement on the elevator. Is this how it should work?

But as soon as I remove the flaps it begins to plummet until you quickly pull the elevator or do some rapid changes with the trim.

Im no expert but is this how it should react?

That will depend entirely on your load and what trim you have set before take-off.

With trim neutral or slightly nose up, rotating by itself at 75 knots with flaps deployed sounds reasonable.

Retracting flaps should cause the aircraft to nose down. More importantly, without flaps the stall speed will  be higher.  Hence, retracting flaps while low and slow is never a good plan.

Edited December 28, 20223 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

Ok thanks. At what point should the flaps be retracted?

Generally not until you have obtained best climb speed and reached at least 300' - some people would say 500'.

I believe at or above 400ft agl.

Some airplanes lift off by itself just because flaps and trim set to take off. When you raise flaps you likely to experience sinking/ nose deeping which you should precede/compensate  by moving yoke aft .

 

As far as flaps clean up it depend on many factors such obstacle clearance  , poh or ops recommendation . Basically you do that when you render it safe (usually after establishing stabilized climb)

Caravan POH:

Takeoff: Flaps 20 (70 - 75 KTS)
Flaps 10: 85 KTS
Flaps Up: 95 KTS

I've found these to work fairly well with the modded version.  I normally apply forward pressure and have to trim down a little to keep the aircraft from lifting off early.  The main problem with bringing the flaps up is Asobo's really bad integration of flap control for this aircraft - there is no "detent" for 10° and attempts to assign a slider from my controllers for this hasn't worked.  I have to mouse up the flap control to get 10° which is a pain.

If I am in a hurry or the air is choppy I just accelerate to 95 KTS, then bring the flaps up full.  Be sure to apply good back pressure and trim her up, because she will certainly take a dive when moving the flaps that distance in one go.

In the RW, I used to takeoff with 152's and 172's on occasion (fairly calm days) by simply applying a little back pressure during the takeoff roll (turf field) until they flew themselves off, so yes, this can certainly happen.  In the case of the Caravan I want to make sure that it's reached proper VR.

I used to fly the C-208B in freight operations IRL many years ago. During training while empty, the plane did want to leap off of the runway at or near rotation speed, as best as I can recall.  And of course while empty it would accelerate quickly and the flaps could be retracted fully with no worry about sinking.  

With a full payload, and depending on where the center of gravity ended up, I had to be focussed during the take-off roll because it would be different every time (especially if my assumption for the trim position was not perfect).  Naturally the rotation was fairly mushy unless the center of gravity was aft.  But I did take my time to establish climb speed and follow the POH and company rules for flap retraction.  

As a side note, our determination of CG with a full cargo load was to see how easy it was to remove the tail stand.  If you had to put your shoulder into the fuselage to unlatch the tail stand, the CG was pretty far aft.  If the stand was not touching or was barely touching the ground and the payload was max, CG was probably too far forward.  The sweet spot was when you could push up slightly on the fuselage to remove the tail stand.  

Telling on myself here:  There was one time when I decided to accept the loaded condition even though I really had to do a strong push up on the fuselage to remove the tail stand.  The problem with that was, the CG moved aft with fuel burn, so at my next stop I asked the ground crew to install the tail stand before I got out of the cockpit because I didn't want the plane to settle onto the tail!  😮 

On 12/28/2022 at 9:32 PM, RandallR said:

The main problem with bringing the flaps up is Asobo's really bad integration of flap control for this aircraft - there is no "detent" for 10° and attempts to assign a slider from my controllers for this hasn't worked.  I have to mouse up the flap control to get 10° which is a pain.

You can also use the default bindings on the keyboard, F5 fully retract, F6 incrementally retract, F7 incrementally extend, F8 fully extend 🙂

Or bind this on your yoke/stick.

I already have all of this bound to my joystick - it doesn't work for the Caravan.

Asobo has set up the flaps for the Caravan at the main detents only.  Using incremental, it will only go to 20°, Full Extend or Full Up.  This means that the bindings cannot be used for 10° or any other position.  I tried to remedy this by binding the flaps to a joystick slider in the same manner that I bind the air brakes for the CJ4 so that I can have continuous control (it works beautifully for the CJ4).  Unfortunately, Asobo does not provide the same axis options for the flaps as it does for the air brakes so none of this works.

The only way to properly run the Caravan flaps and follow the POH for takeoff is to grab the flaps control with the mouse to obtain a 10° setting, which is a word not allowed while trying to trim for climb after rotation.