Control stick, AoA, autothrust in lites
Salute!
Thanks to EMIT, thanks.....
- The transition from a big stick or yoke to the "force" transducers was very easy. Like about 3 or 4 seconds on first flight. Put some pressure on the stick and the jet moved ( rolled or pitched). I flew with many fossils and newbies in the family model, and that was my experience when letting them fly.
- The family model sticks "added" the command for roll and pitch, and we could not see the other guy's inputs, nor would it have made any difference. as the stick didn't move more than a few millimeters. So I could 'help" the newbie, but if I let go he would wonder why the jet was trying to climb a bit on final approach.
- I flew three jets with the AoA indicators. The two that counted were the SLUF and the Viper. The SLUF was a Navy variant and had the "indexer" lights up on the glareshield, or on one side of the Head Up Display. This allowed us to fly the optimum AoA on approach without calculating weight versus speed. AoA is AoA, regardless of your weight.... duuuuuh. We still had to do a rough, rule-of-thumb, correlation of our indicator with the airspeed we expected. This was due to leading edge flaps that allowed a higher speed for the same AoA and other factors. Nevertheless, the Navy folks here can tell ya about the AoA "indexer" lights.
- The Hornet has an "autothrust" feature. Only did a few approaches in the sim, but I basically used pitch for AoA , and let the motors handle the vertical velocity part of the function. Not sure how this works for the heavies, and I really didn't find the feature all that neat. I preferred to trim for the AoA and use throttle for descent. I also had the neat HUD flight path doofer to see where I would impact if I didn't change anything. Saw it first in 1971 when checking out in the SLUF, and it was a real treat.
As another contributor has stated, wings provide lift according to AoA and "q". It's the same for a 'bus as for a Cessna or an F-22. I do not advocate yet another indicator in the cockpit, but for approaches an AoA indicator could be very useful. OTOH, when near a stall or actually in a stall, the AoA indicator is of extreme value.
One of these days I can digitize my HUD video of the leading edge failure episode. The flight path marker really helped me, as the bird was yawing quite a bit, reacting funny with roll inputs ( all 1 -2 pounds of available command authority) and you can see my goal - 1,000 feet down the runway!
from the high mountains in Colorado, I comment, read, and learn from my fellow pilots flying vastly different aircraft.......