The physic in the landing

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I was reading about the building of wheels of airliners and it’s quite an interesting engineering tour de force, given each wheel must bear more than the weight of a full truck and its trailer statically (aka when the plane is on the ground), and much more than that when the plane is landing.

One fact tidbit is that at touchdown, because the downward force is so enormous, (and each wheel weighs 150 kg), the wheels don’t spin immediately, they skid for a few meters, meaning the rubber instantaneously melts and vaporizes, which is why you see smoke at that moment.

Typically, for a GA aircraft that weighs 1500 kg, each wheel must be able to bear at least 500 kg and closer to 1 metric ton at landing time. So I can imagine that there is indeed a rail effect at that moment.

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I never landed tail draggers on the front wheels, sofar… I always did a very slow, gentle glide landing with Carenado CMY or Kitfox, to avoid damaging the landing gear (tail wheel). That seems not needed anymore.

I got myself a new one yesterday, Cessna L-19 Bird Dog. Flies great, also the water plane version. Mind the switch, though… there is a switch to set landing in “water mode”.

Another thing I noticed with L-19 it needs some rudder fiddling. This is needed for Kitfox too if you want to fly it you need a properly set rudder. Before takeoff, when you inspect the airplane and controls, make sure you move the rudder left and right, until the jumps are gone. Set it in the middle and take off… it makes the correction (rudder walk) far more predictable.

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Just out of curiosity, are you a real world pilot? Do you have any hours in real taildraggers?

I only ask because, previous experience in other sims does not qualify for comparison between right and wrong. Unless there is a real world baseline to apply the comparison there is no way to determine what is exagerated and what is accurate. The best one can say, without the real world baseline, is that MSFS is different from other sims.

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However to be honest the right person to be asking these questions of would be an aeronautical engineer not a pilot. Flight sims in general suffer from too many programmers and not enough engineers.

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I’m pretty sure it’s a pretty bad attempt at the latter. These guys are all pilots at the top. But, above them is MS telling them what to do, which typically means, “make it work for everybody”.

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Asobo have admitted to dumbing down the turbulence.

Even then people claim the in game turbulence is “too extreme” .

Most peoples only experience of things like turbulence or crosswind is flying in airliners that fly above the weather.

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Purposely avoiding turbulence as best they can

(though I do fairly vividly remember that flight at 5000 ft in a SAAB from Atlantic City to LaGuardia in a thunder storm one night :wink: )

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Great post related to this topic can be found here.

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This video shows how taildraggers should behave on landings. This behavior is very different from what we see in msfs 2020.

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No, I am not a RL pilot, but many actual pilots with experience already stated that the landing and ground physics in MSFS is really bad in comparison to RL and even in comparison to other sims that simulate it better.

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In which way is the behavior ‘very different’ (apart from the fact that there are no default warbirds in MSFS)?

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First of all there are two warbirds in the sim. Flyingiron’s Spitfire and Milviz’s Corsair. In the video you can see that if you don’t make a very soft landing and at the right speed with the spitfire, it tends to bounce several times until the wing loses lift. In the sim, no matter how hard the landing has been, there are no bounce. It’s like the wheels stick to the ground. The same happend with other taildragger airplanes.

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Read again, I wrote default warbirds.
You can’t compare a heavy Spitfire with e.g. a Cub and even the non-hardsurface runways in MSFS are much less bumpy than the grass runway in your video.

I’m not experiencing sticking wheels and bounced landings do occur on my setup.
The shock absorbers can be adjusted in the FDM.

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Three. Big Radials have a payware Curtiss P-40B Warhawk/Tomahawk available as well.

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I was very badly surprised to hear that! even desesperate about the future of MFS2020 :scream: :worried: hhh knowing that some of them were claiming for more realism in the same way! …What a paradox?!
I friendly guess that they are not very curious to understand how it goes in the skies for real, at all! … Saying that turbulence is “too extreme” in MFS2020 sounds very odd to me, that lets me speechless especially when you can still fly a C152 or a Cub in the heart of a dark thunderstorm without any damage due, for instance, to huge convective winds updraft/downdrafts/ice etc that are totally absent in the game (in the sim) which do not simulate Air Mass movement in a realistic way even if some turb feels realistic especially during the approach due to relief and other aspirities, at certain moment in MFS2020, same for CAT that I even feel better than in Xplane/Active Sky (spending more time on Xplane 75% and 20% MFS2020, 5% Farm Simulator when I’m too frustrated as a grounded pilot now! Kidding :upside_down_face:) …

Well I do miss in MFS2020 the lack of other dangers in the sky, as big time turb in CB that you can encounter sometimes IRL which you try to avoid VRF or/and IFR as much as possible; even in Active Sky Xplane! (not perfect but at least you can stall your A319 Toolis or the FF757 just by going too deep into TS or you can break and damage to a lethal point your ultra-light SP30 because of severe convective winds/CB in Xplane/Active Sky which is even challenging for a training pilot or else, a simmer who cannot fly in real but who wants to learn by passion, some simmers are even more passionate about aviation sometimes than a few bored colleagues by tha way! …

Step by step hopefully MFS2020 will think to implement those precious realistic features, same for the improvements in the flight model area, they work on it so … However as it was already mentioned here the team even step back to please “everybody”!!! That makes me worried if their choice are only based on the wish-list!

Anyway, claiming that turbulence is too strong when in MFS2020 you can fly a PA28 in any kind of severe weather conditions of the day without even avoiding huge cells because nothing happens, comon! hhh … So that I still ask myself why sometimes in real life I had to stay grounded and canceled my VFR flight just because the cloud CB base was just at only 1200 ft?! In MFS2020 just click and fly no problem man go! …

Well, for the sake of realism you really don’t want to fly your PA28 or any kind of light bird under the base of CB for example, certainly not in TS for your safety and the precious life of your pax, trust me on that! :sunglasses:

I wish that those precious requests I can read here and there about physics/flight model/dynamics/Live Weather could be on the top of the wish-list asap rather that requesting the addition of contrails at the first place! …
Also I wish that the team could add an option as “Realistic Mode” and “Arcade mode” because flying in TS/CB as it goes in MFS2020 and not being “obliged” to create a flight plan based on the weather conditions it’s closest that an arcade mode in those terms than a realistic approach of aviation imo…
With this option many of us should be happy, gamers, GTA dudes, simmers, hardcore-simmer and pilots, everybody in the same sky at different modes, what about that! … eventually Beautiful Skies Ahead in MFS2020 !

Sorry to be so long, a novel! Well, there we go: Happy Landings guys (at least even with the physics/dynamics issues) :sunglasses: :airplane:

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Don’t know, my IRL tailwheel experience is with an Aeronca Champ so there might be difference but the L-19 just doesn’t feel right IMHO. Same with the Cubs.

The developers should learn from DCS, quite good simulation there.

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It’s weird isn’t it.

I guess it might come with the fact that as soon as there’s a hurricane, people flock to it to see it, and fly their cessna’s straight through it.

I wish we had an option to enable realistic turbulence as well. If I fly an A320 into a storm cell I want to see it drop / lift 1500 ft, or flip over, or get a game-over screen due to overstress. Might be nice to have a working weather radar first though, instead of the ‘cloud radar’ we have currently.

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I second that 100%!

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