PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Trim Use During Approach Phase in Visual Patterns
Old 31st October 2012 | 00:53
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Topper Pimpi
 
Joined: Jun 2012
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From: ...nella capsula aneroide
WoW, I'd never expected such response to this post, I'm receiving so many
suggestions that I can only thank you all for this, even if there is someone a little too rough in his comments ;-) I want to thank especially Piper.Classique, sevenstrokeroll, Big Pistons Forever and mad_jock, which are helping me to understand even myself :-D and are trying to be constructive.

I know the importance of mantain the right attitude for every phase of flight, and the importance of a correct use of (elevator) trim tab to obtain this. Teaching to my students what the trim wheel is for is very important to me, to trim for an airspeed, an attitude or for just relieve the force on the yoke.

In the past I came across some pilots who made me concerned about this matter: some of them where used to really overtrim (nose up, slow speed), so when it happened we had to go-around on base or final, the nose was so light that he struggled visibly completing the maneuver . Another one was an abituč of overshooting the final, so he was fine with doing steep turns at low speed to regain the centerline, using too much rudder and messing up with the ailerons. Thats why I came up with those mumblings over handling sensitivity and use of trim and so on... thoughts wich are meant for the initial phase of the circuit pattern training: after having demonstrated all the primary and secondary controls effects, climb and descents, slow flight and stall, in this phase I try to make them mix everything to perform a pattern safely as part of a teaching strategy.

When it comes the time to hit the pattern, I think it's useful if the student learn how to do it with stic and throttle, whit just little help from the trim: learning how to mantain that descent angle and that speed mixing pitch and power by his own, can definitely help in my opinion, when he will use the trim on heavier planes (or autotrim, autopilot maybe in the future), being more aware of what is going on under his hands. So, if we have the a/c fine trimmed for a downwind speed and then we start the approach reducing power, we just make the a/c have a healthy nose down tendency, wich is nice to understand energy management in the pattern, here the pilot will act to obtain the right speed and the right descent angle.

Again, this isn't done with a complete out of trim a/c, but just the amount to keep on the hands of the students the responsability of the landing, and just until necessary. Nobody here is teaching to land with an a/c trimmed for a dive as well nobody should stress too much about trimming to a complete neutral control feeling in approach, at least on a vfr approach! Training aircraft are built to naturally lower the nose when short on energy, even the full automated airbus leaves to the pilot the job of round up the descent, level off and flare. Overtrimming on base or final, at low speed/high AOA and low altitude, can turn out to be more dangerous than the opposite I think.
About go around, the priorities are stop the descent, increase speed and then climb. Stop losing altitude/energy should be an instinctive all-in-one maneuver of level flight attitude+full power; if to do it I have to keep the nose down in order to regain energy because of a nose-up over-trimmed a/c, well it's everything but instinctive.

To conclude, if in vfr patterns the most important thing is to look out, basically I want make them learn how to keep the correct attitude just with external references, keeping rwy and aiming point under control while cross-checking the airspeed, this until the pilot freezes the big picture in his mind. After that, in my opinion, is far more easyer to show how with that specific picture/power setting we can obtain safe approaches even without airspeed indication, or how to fixate that particular attitude on the artificial horizon to obtain the same performance when visual conditions are poor, etc... Again sorry about my non-native english, I'm just trying to do my best, maybe everything it's just mental mastubation. I'm not trying to reinvent anything cause nothing more new can be invented about flight, that's just an effort to find my way in it, for sure I miss a standardization course .
Thanks for your comments.
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