flymeaway

My Feedback: (6)

What is the preferred IMAC way to set CG, nose heavy, neutral, or slightly tail heavy?

Not being into 3D at all I always try to set up my planes so that they are a touch nose heavy of neutral. In other words inverted flight on a 45 up line requires a slight push to keep the nose on the 45. Honestly I've never tried neutral or tail heavy for precision flying so I have no idea what is better. Seems to me that slight nose heavy of neutral makes sense.

I've never competed but have been flying the basic routines for about three years now so I still have a ton to learn and much room for improvement. I would imagine that all the little details would compound to either make precision flying "easier" or cause one to fight with the plane.

Thanks for any input.

exeter_acres

My Feedback: (2)

I set my IMAC plane neutral to slightly bias to the nose.....

mithrandir

My Feedback: (2)

it seems that not having pitch attitude changes with power modulation and speed changes would be a good thing.....

neutral'ish to an RCH of positive stability is prolly where the majority of people are gonna land on this issue.....

Basically... what ever CG results in the lowest pilot workload and makes the plane fly the easiest will be the answer....


tail heavy??? Ugh... terrible pitching from changing speeds.... a definite NOT

imho

cutaway

Avoid tail heavy. A plane that's even slightly tail heavy won't be "locked in" pitch stable and becomes almost impossible to fly in a straight line. When you see some plane on it maiden flight porpising/hunting around in pitch that's almost always tail heavy.

mcollier

My Feedback: (5)

I would have to agree with what you guys are saying...

You want your plane to be able to fly inverted wthout having to push a lot of elevator...there are many lines in the routine that you will be inverted, so you don't want to be in a situation that every time you roll over you're fighting to maintain a horizontal line, it will look choppy and wavy.

It is more of a "feel" thing to get it right where you like it, if your too far back it will be ultra-sensitive on the elevators, and climb on an inverted 45. If your too far forward,when you're inverted, you will need a lot of down elevator to keep the nose up...also entering the spin, you need the plane to stall on command, too far forward, and it will not stall properly. At the stall moment, you enter into a 1 1/2 turn spin, followed by an established down-line, with a constant raduis pull-out to horizontal, so you dont have a lot of time to put it all together, thats why you need that stall to be predictable and on time.

Just my thoughts,

Good luck!

cutaway

Another thing is to shoot for is mounting your expendables (fuel, smoke, etc) as close to the CG as possible. Then there won't be a CG shift as they're expended.