Does the X-Plane 737-800 flight model include pitch disturbances due to flap or landing gear setting changes?

Question

This is a detailed technical thing.

Background: I have 30 hours on a Pacific Simulators PS3.5 737-800 fixed-base simulator, learning, for fun, to fly her.  (Long story.)  One of the things that drove me crazy until I figured out what was going on was that the airplane would pitch up or down with no yoke input when I changed the flap settings or raised or lowered the landing gear.  I eventually figured out that this was to be expected: I was changing the shape of the wing, and hence its lift, but NOT changing the shape of the fuselage or the horizontal tail, so OF COURSE the lift moments would change, inducing a torque about the CG.

One of the other well-known home 737-800 models does NOT model this effect.

I want to set up a home sim that does include this, so I can stay current, in some sense, on the "real" thing, instead of spending hours knocking rust off from the months I am unable to fly.  (When the simulator you're flying is LITERALLY halfway around the world from where you live, you don't get there on a weekly basis.)

Does the X-Plane 737-800 flight model include this?  If not currently, any plans to put it in?

Answer 1

Hi,

Of course it does. Every serious flight simulator does it actually, and X-plane is the only one to be a digital wind tunnel.

Laminar Research communicates a lot, many articles have been written about it, by them and others.

If you want to have a good picture of how far the flight dynamic goes, this a good article to start with :
http://developer.x-plane.com/2016/12/fight-model-improvements-done-for-x-plane-11-00/

That being said, it is always possible that one day, you find this or that behaviour to be a bit strange. You could always report it here on this forum or even on X-plane bug report page :
http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html

If Laminar Research can reproduce it and the bug is confirmed, they would place it in their priority list and fix it as soon as they can.

Regards,
Guillaume

Comments

Thank you!  This is exactly what I needed to know!