side-slipping the Citabria - mission impossible?

[Guest Chris13]

Hi all,although I am mostly a lurker in this forum, I am quite interested in Fly 2. I have several hundred hours of real-life stick time in civilian aircraft though mostly on gliders and single engine aircraft. Due to job and family obligation I am grounded for now. To get over it, I have recently bought the RealAir Citabria/Decathlon package. Overall, I am very pleased with it and thoroughly enjoy flying it, it is a thoroughly researched plane, very nice to look at and handle. The only thing which I find very unconvincing is side-slipping her in. I am flying with stick and rudder pedals. Although it is much easier to get the plane into the right attitude than other planes in Fly2, for some reason the rate of sink hovers around zero. Even at very low speeds I float along the runway sideslipping but not quite making a touch-down (and that is the entire runway at Frankfurt airport!). As soon as I let the controls go, the plane begins to sink rapidly or stalls right away. Do other people experience the same? Again, I haven't flown this model in real life (yet), but I have flown similar planes and I am confident that something is not quite right here.Chris

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

Hi Chris!Welcome here!Did you set this setting in the fly.ini:ignoreSlopeWind=1I don't have the Citabria, but I had this problem with other planes. Slope wind in Fly! II is totally unrealistic!Cheers!Pascal

[RandallR 444]

Chris,I would agree with Pascal on this one - the Citabria & Decathlon's slip is very realistic. The problem is probably the slopw wind setting.

[Guest Chris13]

Thanks for the welcome to this forum, I have learnt to appreciate this as a very informative and friendly place (not withstanding the occasional MS FS versus Fly! series debate :-wink2 )I scanned the fly.ini settings and the line you are referring to presumably reads ignoreSlopeWind=1 (spelling?, but it is set to 1)Doesn't this ensure that slope winds are ignored?I vaguely remember changing it in the process of installing the Citabria, where I followed the instruction given in the readme to the letter.Maybe I have not made myself very clear in the opening post, the plane behaves very nicely and the sideskip looks and feels good, it is easy to initiate and maintain the typical sideslip attitude with a low wing and a rather strong yaw to the other side. But the rate of sink associated with it simply isn't right. It should greatly increase during a sideslip and it should decrease during normal flight, all else being equal. At least on my machine this is not the case. During a side slip with throttle on idle the rate of sink is practically nill for unlimited time. As soon as I stop side-slipping it feels like the normal aerodynamics kick in and suddenly the rate of sink increases to an expected level. It does not matter if the side-slip is done in nose-high or nose-low attitude, the plane can be side-slipped, but it unexpectedly stops sinking during the sideslip.Maybe the plane behaves differently on other people's computers, but there is no way that this is realistic. I am not bashing the plane BTW, I really like it and it shows that so many people invested so much time in it. I just wanted to share this observation and ask if other people can reproduce the problem. Chris

[RandallR 444]

Chris,It has been a while since I flew the Citabria - I'll have to dust it off and experiment. Because of my schedule, I can't do this for a few days.How does she respond for you in a forward-slip?

[Guest Chris13]

Sorry, english is not my first language, can you explain what you mean by forward-slip? Is that what I called nose-low attitude during the sideslip? I would be interested to know if I am the only one with this problem. Maybe I shall go ahead and re-install the plane.>Chris,>>It has been a while since I flew the Citabria - I'll have to>dust it off and experiment. Because of my schedule, I can't>do this for a few days.>>How does she respond for you in a forward-slip?

[RandallR 444]

Chris,Here in the States we speak of two types of slips: side-slip and forward-slip.The side-slip is normally used to hold a line in a cross-wind, often applied in a crosswind approach. The windward wing is dropped into the wind, while opposite rudder is held to keep the nose aligned with the runway. Now, if there were no wind, this would result in the aircraft "slipping" or sliding to the side towards the dropped wing, hence the name "side-slip".The forward slip is used to lose altitude quickly, while maintaining forward momentum. The nose is swung off-line creating a skid - the "forward" wing is then dropped to decrease lift while maintaining direction. As the aircraft will then lose altitude quickly while moving along the original flight-line, we refer to it as a "forward-slip". This was a common practice back when many aircraft were tail-draggers and had no flaps - the procedure allowed flapless aircraft to lose altitude quickly when they were too high on the approach. We also use it with modern aircraft in combination with flaps for spot-landing control.As a pilot, I know you are aware of and have probably used these procedures, just that our names for them may be different because of language.

[Guest Chris13]

Ah, ok, I have been talking about forward-slip then. In light aircraft this would most commonly be initiated by moving aileron first, e.g. left, and then adding right rudder to maintain and enlarge the adverse yaw created by aileron movement and keep the plane move forward over ground. BTW, aerodynamically these two slips are quite similar even though the aircraft appears to behave very differently when viewed from the ground. In both cases the fuselage and wings are less than perfectly aligned with the airflow and thus the plane would be expected to sink faster than when moving into the wind. Thank you for correcting me, I get along ok in every day language but sometimes even not so rarely used technical terms seem to escape my memory. Chris