PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Interesting note about AA Airbus crash in NYC
Old 6th Jan 2007, 16:09
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Few Cloudy

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Join Date: Apr 2000
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Rudders and training

Sorry to hark back to the dark ages but when I trained on the Victor K1 (one of the first big 4 jets for our American colleagues) which was very sweptback with its sickle shaped wing, we had two yaw dampers - hydraulic and electric - one as a backup. The Victor at altitude was very easy to overcontrol, in all axes and steep turns for instance could be a nightmare for a new pilot.

During training the two YDs were often selected Off and a demo Dutch roll was allowed to develop. We than had to stop it but Never with the rudder! You waited until the wings went through the horizontal and then put in an opposite aileron input to the direction of roll. On the roll back you did the same again and after about three oscillations she was under control. Of course some people did try to use the rudder because it was after all the Yaw damper which had been switched Off and those people got into great big problems - far from damping out the oscillation. they aggravated it because the rudder was far too powerful a control for a human to make the tiny and timely corrections required, as the YD did.

Later in life (sorry for the history lesson) I did some maintenance test fliying which involved stalling the aircraft (MD-80). This was about the only time I have used the rudder in flight and that was if one wing stalled before the other, causing a wing drop. Out of roll aileron has the effect of increasing the AA on the dropping wing, so it stalls even more. The way out is a very careful single gentle application of rudder to engender a secondary effect of roll, at the same time getting on with the stall recovery ASAP.

Now you canīt compare that to rudder reversals and we were of course at a very low IAS but even there that barn door was hugely powerful. It needs a lot of respect and that message needs to be got over to each new generation of trainers and students.

It aint a Pitts.
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