Taxiing and Ground Handling and other Flight Dynamic Questions

Question

I had questions on the ground handling of taildraggers, such as the Stinson.

It seems that in X-Plane 11, the stinson is pretty much unflyable, as the aircraft will veer off the runway despite having full rudder deflection in the opposite direction. I know tail wheel aircraft are hard to handle, but this is relatively obnoxious (and I do  have about 25-30 hours in actual tail draggers, which are much more benign compared to X-plane's aircraft). It seems that the rudder inputs are not correct this seems to be a common problem among ALL taildraggers. I've only had one or two that seem to fly OK, but a lot of them do not.

There is a lesser effect also with traditional aircraft as well, but tail wheel aircraft seem to especially have that issue.

Are there plans to address this? It seems that gyroscopic effects when pitching forward, combined with the weather vaning of the aircraft really seem to offset the friction on the ground.

I am sure this has been brought up many times before.

Comments

And actually to add to that, the flap pitching moments seem to be off as well for some aircraft, such as the Stinson. I notice that when flaps are deployed, the aircraft seems to pitch wildly up. I know this is simulating the pitching effects when you lower flaps, but when you're slowing down below VFe speeds, and deploy the flaps only to have the aircraft pitch up almost to a stall attitude...this does not seem correct either. I've noticed this with a couple of the default aircraft where I have to put an excessive amount of nose-down trim to the point where I do not have any elevator authority.

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With 11.30 and the experimental flightmodel, the Stinson is now somewhat flyable again. I've managed a few takeoffs and landings at least without drama. Other tail draggers seem to have benefited as well. I have an old cessna 170 file that I've been copying between installations that is now usable again as well (it wasn't for a few releases).

As for the Stinson, it is included with x-plane so maybe worth the trouble to tune it a little further. It's a beautiful plane and I imagine it would shine in VR as it is a relatively basic airplane to fly with lots of visibility out of the cockpit.

In fairness, these planes are supposed to be hard to control and you are supposed to be on the rudders. With a twist joystick there's only so much you can do in terms of inputs. So' it's pretty easy to ground loop with a joystick.

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It may be flyable...but it isn't right. Yes, tailwheel can be hard to control, but the way things seem to respond right now, it doesn't respond realistically.

A Pitts S2C is easier to fly in real life than a tailwheel in X-plane in a crosswind. X-plane 11.30 did address some of the issues, but there is still the 0-10 knot regime where the crosswinds do not behave correctly. It's partially for this reason I've stayed away from X-plane for a while, as it will screw up a real pilot, not help them out.

This comes from about 95 hours of tailwheel experience (60 in the past 12 months), many times gusty conditions with 20-30 degrees off the runway. X-plane makes the same exact condition that would be flyable for a Decathlon unflyable in other taildraggers.

Answer 1

We have a few pilots on our team who use their real world experience to improve X-Plane. However I don't think any of them have much experience with tail dragger aircraft. So we would be interested in a bug report with details of your experience versus the actual results in X-Plane. Try to be as methodical as possible and include a copy of the log.txt.

Comments

Thanks for the response. I'll have to put something together at some point.

One issue I see is that the aircraft seems to weathervane a lot more. I feel like the crosswind component of the aircraft wanting to weathervane is a lot stronger than any rudder effectiveness. The rudder effectiveness at low speeds is practically 0. Some aircraft have absolutely no rudder control when you apply a crosswind correction and will just weather vane straight into the wind. I feel like there is a missing vector on the rudder (or a mis-scaled weather vaning vector in winds).

For the pilots on the team, get your tailwheel! It's worth every penny!