ORIGINAL: roger.alli

How much, if any elevator exponential do you use??

I have been having a little trouble landing my new Super Bandit.. I am not really in control of it pitch wise, in the final hold off, right before touch down. Instead of getting a nice flair and nose high touch down, I am tending to do a little balloon climb to 5’ or so, which results in a nasty flop onto the run way.. (Fortunately the SB is built tough.)

My theory is I am over controlling, possibly due to elevator exponential.
Typically Bandits need a lot of elevator throw to hold off in the final stages of landing. (If you touch down early/fast, the dreaded Bandit bounce happens). To compensate for this high travel rate, I have been running 35% exponential, in an attempt to de-sensitise it at normal flight speeds.

However, I fellow modeller suggests this might be getting me into to trouble. Right before touch down, while holding in a lot of back stick, the exponential is actually making it more sensitive to pitch, which when I think about it would seem to be the case..

Any ones thoughts would be appreciated..


I would say your theory is probably correct. When I set up my F-4 elevators, I put in 30% expo and found that the expo was causing an overly senstive elevator on the flair. Dropping the expo to 10% helped and I am thinking of even taking that out and using the servo slow function to slow the servos a bit. If you watch the video here with Lewis Patton at the sticks, you can see on the landing that the elevator is a bit senstive due to the expo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EInnRANOm7s





Thanks

Roger