On a “REAL WORLD” Cessna 172, it was four full turns from the physical stop at full down trim to the physical stop at full up trim. The takeoff position is about 1 1/3 turn from full up.
A Flight Sim Joystick “Throttle” type control that only moves about 45 degrees is therefore about 16 times too sensitive – making it useless for trimming,
Far better off to use “Trim up” and “Trim down” buttons (or hack a 2nd USB joystick, make a wheel with a 10 turn pot on it, and wire it into the Joystick to replace one of the axis)
Far easier to use Trim Up, Trim Down buttons on the Yoke (as many more modern GA planes do)
The sim software has some “intelligent” processing of those buttons.
When you 1st press the button, it move the Trim wheel slowly. After a few seconds of being pressed, it speeds up.
Worth looking at it visually, so you get an idea of how this operates.
I’m surprised that there are 4 turns. Never had to turn it that far. I’ve never rigged one either. Three pulls followed by a minor adjustment were the most I’ve ever had to use.
The sim setup is like you state. I’ve never run an electric trim, so I don’t know how well the sim matches real life. I only just saw the trim wheel movement the other day. I’ll have to play around with it to see how much each button push turns the wheel. I don’t have the skill to hack the hardware.
As an aside, the trim on the jets in DCS works similarly.
The Trims on the Airlines spin at an alarming rate … get you hand near them, and they can take out a finger.
Its difficult to judge the animation, unless there is a “mark” on the wheel, to help count revolutions, but it looks about right when you run the trim from end to end, and watch the wheel turn.
I know the “show off” AI Pilot in the C172, can trim that fast … in Milliseconds !!!
The trouble is, when you tell him he cannot fly anymore, he cops an “attitude”, and instantly puts the trim back to where it was when he first took over flying the plane, and you can hear him mutter under his breath …
OK, you want to fly – lets see how fast YOU can re-trim the Plane
Or maybe he is just “Bugged” !!!
He sure cannot fly a pattern, and he ■■■■ BIG TIME at landing.
In fact, when he is meant to do a touch and go, he messes up so badly, that he end up landing, and taxiing to GA… maybe me need to change his underwear ???
My solution to trimming…
I actually dont have tremendous difficulties trimming using the buttons on my honeycomb yoke but in anticipation of the honeycomb bravo throttle with a trim wheel I do the following…look down at the trim wheel and click and hold down the mouse key then look up again still with the mouse clicked, then you can move the mouse up or down to trim the plane. Gives absolutely full control and feel for the trim.
I use trackir which makes it easier to look up down.
Only tried on GA planes.
Thoght I might add my 2 cents worth here. Also having issues with trim flying the C172 and 208B. I went back to Xplane to compare…no comparison…trimming much easier in xplane. Is this an issue that needs tweaking or am I just a bad pilot??
BW
It’s not a question of being a bad pilot … in fact I would say you are a Good Pilot because you have identified that the TRIM is “Terribly modeled” in MSFS.
You have even proven it to yourself with X-Plan - thats the easy bit,
The Difficult bit seems to be getting OSOBO to fix it, instead of putting it on “BackLog”
Time for a “Sprint along” the “Stakeholders” are starting to revolt !!
A -100 to 100% trim input control for Aileron & Rudder needs to be added to the sim “CONTROLS” section. Elevator has one (-100 to 100% setting, you can see it listed if you do a search for “Trim” in the controls) but Aileron and Rudder are not present. They simply have Aileron Trim LEFT and Aileron trim RIGHT, and Rudder trim LEFT and Rudder Trim RIGHT. Those will not work with analog potentiometers or sliders, you will crash pretty quickly trying to make it work. This has been submitted via ZenDesk but I’m sure many requests for this were logged way before mine. Since my ticket was marked “solved” my presumption is that it went from the “external” ZenDesk to their internal system as stated in the FAQ’s as far as how the process works. I’m hoping that this will be slated for an upcoming release because it is an inconvenience that should be pretty simple to fix by just adding those two control inputs, thus producing a graphical bar slider from -100 to +100 just like elevator has now!! Also, if they want to be really clever , they would add a % value field to each one (assuming it wouldn’t auto-calibrate…which I would assume it would—in other words, once selected for the analog trim wheel, moving the trim wheel all the way left would take you to the max for each airplane’s max % of trim negative and positive). For example, the Beechcraft King Air 350 Aiieron goes -10% left and +10% right, and the rudder trim goes -25% left and +25% right. If they added that capability it would be icing on the cake, again, if needed.
