Old Dog
Yes I agree that clunking in and out of centre is bad news – or as you so rightly call it breakout. The Hunter’s ailerons were like that. (Hence all the guys waving goodbye as they left the ground on their first Hunter take off). Fortunately, Hugh Merewether – Bill Bedford’s deputy during the early P1127 and Kestrel flying - understood these issues very well and got the message across to the designers at Kingston. Having got rid of backlash, and most of the friction, there just remained the matter of establishing the roll power needed to handle the trim changes close to the ground. It turned out that any thing less than 2 radians per second squared (reaction controls are of course acceleration controls not rate controls like ailerons) was asking for dinged outriggers. The last polish came with the Sea Harrier when we persuaded them to double the sensitivity of the roll control (move your hand half as far for the same effect) despite the fact that the NASA bible on hovering controls said that would lead to overcontrol. (I was pretty sure that bible was based on a false premise – and so it turned out). I had tried hovering with my hand halfway down the stick to achieve the same effect, without the overcontrol that was forecast – so armed with this got the other guys to try it and we were able to force the change through “off the drawing board” for the SHAR. This made it a really sweet aircraft in the hover. It was such an improvement that I managed to take a shot of a fireman with a camera during the first hover. Only the other guys who flew the previous set up appreciated just how much better things had to be to be able to trim it laterally at least well enough to let go for 2-3 secs!
Regards
JF
PS talk about off topic but what the hell.