I experimented with them some years ago on the pitch axis with a prop plane and they definetively worked well.. one of the main benefits I experienced was much more stable landing approaches and easy landings.

However I stopped the experiment when I added too much gain and the airplane experienced wild pitch oscillations at high speed. The system gyro gain-servo inertia simply couldn´t respond at the correct time and it started to amplify the oscillations instead of dampening them... it was pretty scary. The problem was that a lower gain, the gyro wouldn´t stabilize the airplane at low speeds as much as it could.

The ideal setup would be a gyro with some kind of speed sensor attached to it regulating the giro gain .. or better yet, a full controller with some flight rules written into , based on the model reactions in the flight envelope.


Enrique