Hello!
I flew the A5 yesterday and tried out how easy it is to stall it, in real life it’s pretty difficult to impossible ICON Aircraft - A5 Spin Resistance Safety Milestone Demonstration - YouTube
In the sim it started to roll over the wing immediately,
Why is that? Are the plane physics just not good?
The flight models of the Asobo aircraft seem generally not that great. They may fly fine for basic flights and “hit the numbers” alright, but things start to break down when you try maneuvers, stalls, etc. That being said, the elevator_lift_coef in the flight model config for the A5 is not specified (missing) so it is set at the default 5, which is way too high. Sizes are off too. The elevator is set to 15 sq.ft. (same as stabilizer), when in reality it is quite a bit smaller than the stabilizer. Elevator maxangle scalar is also set to 1 and it should be lower than 1. Basically it has too much elevator authority, which enables it to stall/spin instead of just mushing.
In that video there is a useful visual with the strings on the wings, which reveal disrupted airflow that occurs before and during a stall. If the AoA is forced too high, the strings being disrupted extend out to the end of the wings. On the real aircraft, the disruption is minimized, only reaching halfway out each wing. If the sim version had strings, you would see disrupted strings extending all the way to the end of the wings because the AoA is allowed to get too high.
Thank you for the detailed answer, appreciate it!