I need some advice about landing the twin engine piston planes. Basically I’ve got two problems when landing the G58 Baron and the Black Box Islander in particular.
I struggle to get the speed down to a flaps safe speed.
When I put in full flaps for landing I’m really struggling to avoid stalling.
I’m relatively new to flight simming - MSFS is the first sim I’ve devoted much time to. I’ve long had an interest in aviation and over the years have got about 20 hours of flight training logged (mostly on an Ikarus C42), but I’ve never had sufficient money to take it seriously.
I can land most of the single prop planes fairly reliably, but I’m finding the twin engined planes rather more difficult. I suspect my problem is that I’m not trimming the Aircraft correctly, but not sure about this. Trimming a real aircraft correctly is relatively easy because you can feel the pressure on the stick/yoke when the Aircraft isn’t trimmed correctly, but I find trimming the aircraft much more difficult in the Simulator.
Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.
I don’t have any problems to get the speed down on the (default) Baron. Maybe you’re coming in too steep, you should begin reduce your speed before you start your final descent, and make sure to trim to hold your altitude! Try it with the AP on Hold-Altitude first, reduce the thrust, and you’ll see how quickly the speed reduces when the plane doesn’t descent.
You need a lot of thrust on the Baron to overcome the drag with full flaps. I don’t know if this is realistic behaviour, but anyway, with thrust up to 60-70% I was able to hold my speed at around 80-90 kts for final approach.
So yes, 1. may be related to the trimming, but I suspect it’s mostly due to not holding your altitude to slow down. If you use the autopilot, the trimming is done automatically, which can be useful to understand the different effects separately.
Pull off the power and hold the nose up (to stay in level flight) until the speed bleeds off to your approach speed. Then, when you have the speed where you want it, gradually point the nose at mother earth and start to decent.
When I learned to fly, my instructor drummed into me - ‘stick for speed, throttle for altitude’, This is considered a bit old-fashioned now (it was a LONG time ago after all) but the idea certainly helped me get to grips with controlling approach speed when I was just learning.
I don’t have the deluxe edition to test in sim, but just giving you feedback from the real Baron. On the first point, are you operating it based on being able to extend the gear and approach flaps at 152KIAS, or are you waiting until 122KIAS? If you’re waiting until 122KIAS, then using approach flaps and gear at 152KIAS should take care of the issue. If you’re having trouble slowing down from 152KIAS with gear and flaps extended then it’s either a bug or you’re waiting too long to start the descent.
For the second point, full flaps should only be used on short final to help reduce speed from approach speed to Vref, the “Down” setting tells you what both the flaps and the plane are going to do at that setting.
Many aircraft don’t have a single “Vfe” flaps speed. The POH will often list a partial or approach flaps speed too. For the Baron it’s listed as Vfe (full flap) 122kts, (approach flap) 152kts. Make use of the higher approach flap speed to help slow you down. Also the Baron’s gear extension speed is 152kts. Dropping the wheels is pretty much akin to throwing an anchor out: you’ll definitely slow down!
For the BN2 (I don’t have the aircraft so this is from an online POH): Vfe full flap 88kts, take-off flap 114kts. The gear of course is down and welded.
The procedure that your Ikarus instructor will have taught you for climbing and descending - PAT - Power - Attitude - Trim (and APT when levelling off from a climb), still holds true in these bigger aircraft. When you start your descent, reduce power and let the speed bleed off. The nose will naturally want to drop, so you need to hold the attitude. At the desired speed, lower the nose. Once you have a stable descent, trim the aircraft.
Trimming in the sim is different to trimming a real aircraft, because you are trimming the stick back to the neutral position rather than trimming out the forces at the current stick position. Which makes it (I think) a bit less intuitive. But just keep at it
@pletch99
That’s strange. Is your flight model set to modern?
In a 1000ft/min descent, the speed reduces pretty quick, even to the 122kts limit.
Climb with full flaps and gear down results in a ~900ft/min ROC.
Trimming in MSFS is more difficult than IRL (using the same trim-to-remove-pressure method)
due to the fact that most MSFS aicraft have a very low longitudinal stability.
Hello,
Questions about aircraft belong in either the Default Aircraft section or Third Party Addon Discussion > Aircraft section. Because a third-party aircraft is in this topic, I have moved your post to Third Party.