Anyone know a good guide on how to take off and land in crosswinds? I’m all over the runway. I have a feeling that with landing it might not even be possible without rudder toe brakes.
These are from the DC-3 Haynes Manual. One covers landings in general the other mentions crosswinds more specifically. Best of luck!
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Thanks. Reading that it seems like my method of crabbing and using rudder to straighten on flare is a bad idea in the DC3. I should be trying to align the fuselage with the centreline throughout final.
I also need to find the crosswind operating limits. I may have been trying to practice this in crosswinds that are too strong.
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So max recommended crosswind is 13kts on a quick Google. I think my takeoff airport was @ 14kts, and it’s possible my destination airport was more (I don’t think I checked, oops), so that could have well been making my life very hard indeed.
I hear 15kts bandied about a bit. I’m still working on figuring out my regular landings in light wind. Getting some good touch and go’s consistently.
Yeah, I’ve mostly got my light winds takeoffs and landings down pat. Gotta be very gentle with the rudder. But the crosswinds yesterday destroyed me. I used slew to try the landing 5 or 6 times and best I got was one wheel still on the tarmac lol. All the other attempts I was fully in the grass after scraping a wing on the ground lol.
I tried some crosswind landings last night and nailed it. Not crabbing seemed to help a lot.
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I wouldn’t worry too much about your own piloting skills there.
There is a collective consensus, that apparently (obviously?) something is not right in the general flight model Asobo has programmed.
Specifically regarding sideforces effecting the airframe.
Resulting in excessive and unrealistic influences of cross wind.
E.g. excessive unrealistic weathercocking, particularly evident with taildraggers, which are more tricky to control there to begin with.
Asobo states in the SDK, that now in the ‘modern’ flight model, side forces are modeled based on the airframe geometry. Developers are asked to only define the geometry precisely, letting Asobo’s core code do the rest.
Something in there must be off. E.g. a variable that should be in meters being used in feet, thus amplifying it by the factor of three… or such…
Hopefully they find that bug. Soon.
Yes, taildraggers are harder to control on the ground. But they are not that crazy, or otherwise the DC-3 would have never made it to production, killing too many test pilots.