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Question for real life pilots

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Re: Question for real life pilots

Postby Hellmut1956 » Tue May 23, 2023 4:44 pm

I use to have a pilot's license to fly by the visual rules of real planes. I did learn to fly at EDMJ near Munich, Jesenwang. During learning how to fly I had it done using the Cessna 172 as I was expecting flying planes of this category. The runway in EDMJ is 438x12 meters, much shorter and more narrow than most airports in the USA. An advice I can make and which I followed my whole time as a GA pilot is that you learn to fly a plane for your safety and you will find out that if this is your top priority your standards are above legal requirements. The other very important lesson I learned from the way I was taught radio communication is that you should try to keep improving your understanding of the "system" when flying and the rules that apply for radio communication. I did the tests for German language vfr communication, for the English language, and for IFR. Just to give you 2 samples of what this means. A pilot here in Germany got into bad winter weather so the airport of Augsburg was closed and he did have in sight the runway covered with snow. He did not know the rules in exceptional cases, he flew further trying to find an open airport, crashed, and died. If he knew the relevance of a security landing process he would have landed in Augsburg as a security landing. Nobody would be fined a pilot behaving with security in mind. He would still be alive. The other example was one of my own. I trained for about a week intensively in San Jose, California, to learn the differences from flying in the USA. So I did my first cross-country flight from San Jose to Sky Harbour, Phoenix, AZ. My German license had the limitation that I was only allowed to fly in the vicinity of an airport by night. Vicinity is defined as having traffic in sight from my target airport. So I did land in KPHX about 35 minutes after sunset. In my preparation for the flight, I confused the ILS with a VOR on my last leg to KPHX. You should know that I learned to localize an airport in a city as the dark spot in that city. KPHX the lights are so intense that the airport was not a dark spot. As Tower did help me on my final leg and landing in KPHX I did remember a lesson from my radio communication teacher, a former ATC member of the old Munich airport. Never say affirm when you can not comply with a question. So the tower had to instruct me until I was on 45 downwind of the runway in use. Then finally I had the runway in sight. As Tower was aware of my little experience he instructed me to turn 360 to the right until further advice. This was a statement that our radio communication teacher used. So I say "S. Schrah, his name and so I did a standard turn during the night for the very first time. But I was familiar with the Tower instruction and so I was confident and did focus to keep the standard turn, keeping the altitude, and doing 2 360s until Tower cleared me to downwind. This confidence feeling was crucial for my pilot's abilities at that moment. Tower had arranged for an opening to allow me to get to the final in this large cue of 727 approaching KPHX. Then finally when about to touch down on the runway after getting the clearance I requested "long landing" as I wanted to touch down after the point on the runway where the 727 ahead of me had his front wheel touch ground. At this moment touching down behind a bigger airplane is safe. Tower immediately cleared me for "long landing". Landing on such a large airport by night is one of those events you do not forget in your whole life.

But back to the yoke. I have purchased a Brunner force feedback yoke because the yoke from Logitech I use to have did not give me the feedback I was used to. When landing on a short runway like my home one in EDMJ you have to touch down the moment your stall warning starts to ring. In that moment your plane has the slowest speed possible and so the shortest length to come to a stop. At the yoke in the real plane you can feel the plane as you keep pulling the yoke. This war key feedback for me to fine-tune my approach. Brunner yoke should give me that feeling, I hope. The other thing I missed on the GA planes I have flown within the Flight Simulator was the sleeping effect used to decrease the speed of the plane. My feeling is the flight models of the planes do not have this behavior of the planes implemented. If you know a GA plane that has this property implemented, please let me know.
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Re: Question for real life pilots

Postby Alant » Tue May 23, 2023 5:12 pm

The other thing I missed on the GA planes I have flown within the Flight Simulator was the sleeping effect used to decrease the speed of the plane. My feeling is the flight models of the planes do not have this behavior of the planes implemented. If you know a GA plane that has this property implemented, please let me know.


Do you mean side-sliping to increase drag and increase rate of descent without increasing air speed?
I am not aware of this being simulated in FG. However, given suitable aerodynamics data it would be easy to add this to a Jsbsim model.

Alan
Last edited by Alant on Wed May 24, 2023 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Question for real life pilots

Postby S&J » Tue May 23, 2023 7:05 pm

"Stay away from negative people.They have a problem for every solution." - Albert Einstein
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