On some trainer planes they come with a leveling system that levels the plane if you let go of the sticks, now can I or will it work if I put one in my TF P51? Or my 2nd plane the pulse xt? This may be a dumb question but I just had to ask, with a plane like my TF I could not see that being a bad addition to its performance flight characters. If so what part will I need for that and or the pulse xt 40 PNP from H9? Thanks alot, youve all be really great and have learned so much already.

These systems actually hurt pilots. While at first glance it may seem to be a good thing to have the plane "save" itself, or level off as you say. But the downside is that pilots never learn to fly their own planes, and return the plane to level flight themselves. These devices teach pilots that when they get into trouble they should simply let go of the controls. So, if you start using one of these devices the chances are that you are going to have to continue using it simply because you never learn the skills that every other pilot learns with their trainers.

A second problem with these is that they do not always work. So if you use the above situation where you rely on the system to save your plane, and it fail your plane is going to be toast.

IMHO these devices aren't much more than a sales gimmick. Simply learn to fly a plane and you'll be much better off than relying on something like this. Plus, you'll get more satisfaction out of your planes knowing that it's actually you flying them, and not a circuit board.

Ken

You're moving from the TF P-51 to the Pulse XT? Those are your 1st, and 2nd planes?
Sounds like a plan.

I agree with Ken,

Learn to fly the proper way, with out
a crutch.

Bob

its the first thing you unhook when you assemble the plane.

if you have one on a plane I would recomend, removing the sensor, patching the hole in the fuse,and learning to fly without it.
the hole works great for soaking up fuel,when I stripped my fuse of covering on my nextar the area was saturated with oil, and needed alot of clean up before I could recover the fuse.

When my 12 year old went to fly his Nexstar (he soloed on the first flight) I would not let him use any of the supplied crutches. I unhooked the flight stabalization device and removed the wing extensions. I told him he can learn the right way or not at all. For the stabalization device to work properly the sun has to be at a certain angle to the ground, because it works off of sunlight. Sorry but a p-51 is not considered a second plane or even a third plane.

I don't know about that, after my nextar I had a GIZMO which is alot like a sig something extra,then a Hangar-9 P-40 for my 3rd plane, which flys alot more nimbly than my H-9 Mustang my 4th all are in quite flyable shape no crashes,other than my Nextar.
really the H-9 line of planes are quite easy to fly once you have a grasp of the basics of non correcting planes they fly where you point them and are real floaters.

I know of no competent (Key word) instructor who will agree to work with anyone using a Nexstar with that gimmick activated. In every case it steepens the learning curve and hinders the training process.

Now you want to use that one or several other similar devices to skip start your climb up the skills ladder, well it does not work that way if you start skipping rungs in the climb up the ladder then you are looking at a financial diasaster. Those skills can only be acheved 'one' step at a time and that applys to everyone. There is no such thing as a natural pilot, that is a myth. No one is born with the skills and knowledge that will be needed for success. To succeed you climb the ladder one step at a time or you fail.

John

well i can agree with those that say that the device is not reliable and that could ultimately contribute to the doom of your airplane rather than saving it... now for the but...

BUT... isn't a lot of dihedral an automatic levelling system? i know many trainers that releasing the sticks basically levels the plane. the larger the dihedral, the larger the righting force. now, does a trainer with large dihedral = a crutch? i think not! in fact, back in the 3 channel days, all planes were self levelling. difference was that you couldn't easily take that stability away.

with the nexstar, i assume that they have given someone the flexibility of starting off slow and picking it up at their own pace without having to worry about having to buy a new setup. i don't see what the fuss is about.

now back to the topic at hand, i do agree that it makes no sense to put the device on anything but a trainer. if your flying a warbird, you should be way past this stage in the game. flying a TF mustang with an automatic levelling system is like riding a ducati with training wheels. are training wheels bad? of course not! but on a ducati? or it's like flying a cub or other short coupled plane with a gyro... uh oh... may have opened up a can of worms on that one :-)

I always tell my students to un hook it...I can tell when one is hooked up, the airplane fights the turn

That's entirely true, and maybe having a crutch isn't always a bad thing while learning. Of course... When was the last time dihedral caused your plane to get confused about which was was up and flip the plane over?

That being said, the sensors are usually directly attached to a custom receiver in an rtf plane. I've seen it for sale as a separate unit, but can't remember what it was called. It's probably a bad idea for any plane that isn't going to spend 100% of it's time flying straight and level though. Otherwise you'll be fighting with it constantly. That's why they're normally only on trainers.

There have been many similar devices including the Futaba PA-1, PA-2, The old israli built BTA (Perhaps BTE my memory is short) The FMA auto pilot and the product included with the full Nexstar package. They all use various pitch/roll sensing methods. Some are single axis (roll) and some include pitch axis as well such as the BTE and perhaps the FMA that one I am not familiar with.

I beleve none of them use a special Rx. Also I think you will find all of them while they do work will require many flights by a skilled pilot to fine tune the gains for the desired effect and in almost every case when they are being used as a skills crutch this does not happen and the devices become a severe liability to the airplanes survival.

As for the argument that airplanes with dihedral is just he same thing. Not true, aerodynamic stability acheved by dihedral (roll) and hugh oversize stabilizers and creative decaledge (pitch) provide a totally 'passive' form of stability. Not so with the gimmicks which provide only 'active' stability with control imput.

This fighting of controls is totally counter productive for any student and defeats any real abiliy to aquire flying skills. Its a dead end gimmick in any flight training application.

There is however one application where they are of some use and that is true cross counry flying via chase car and the reason I experimented with the old BTE and PA-1.

John

if the system is a liability, then it shoudn't be used. but if it helps the student, whether actively or passively, it can be of value. it just needs to be reliable.

fighting of controls? it fights the controls much like dihedral. when you release the sticks, it rights itself much like dihedral. if it does that well, then why not? problem, however, is it that it seems to do it unreliably.

reliability, i think, is the issue. the crutch? i don't think it's wrong to have a little help when you're a beginner. my two cents!

Points all well taken Forestoke but the problem with all these things is when attempted to be used in the training evironment and particularly when being used by someone attempting to bypass the need altogether for training then they indeed are a crutch and even worse a severe liability.

The real danger is the implication that they make teaching oneself to fly easier which is quite the opposite. Every single one of them require extensive setup and fine tuning of the various gains which means more than just a few flights with even competant pilots forced to deal with a poor flying airplane. Now do you think this loner somewhere depending on this crutch is ever going to get this thing fine tuned before taking off by himself to teach himself, very unlikely and it is only going to hasten the demise of the airplane with the self teaching individual totally befuddled.

I think you will find in the cases where a competant instructor who attempts to use the devices soon realizes that the wasted time in finetuning of the devices to make them usable just never happens and they only serve as hindrance even in the dual instruction situation. They will increase the learning curve in every type of learning environment increasing the total time spent before any student reachs any given level of competant skills. In short they are a liability in the learning environment.

John

I am thinking about installing one of these in a glider not because not to avoid crashing but to help keep it level when it is really up higher than I can see. When it is not much more than a spec it is hard to tell how level the wings are. If such a device will keep the wings level then I expect it could better thermal.

If you are having a hard time seeing the spec...you can't tell if the wings are level or not....how can you enjoy flying????? do you have a device that records altitude and speed?

Even if you overcome this problem, there is a larger one involved when a person teaches themselves to fly with this device. I mentioned this earlier, but I'll bring it up again as it's very pertinent to this discussion. When somebody is learning to fly on their own they quickly discover that the easiest way to level the plane, or save it if it's in trouble, is to let go of the sticks and the device will level the plane out. Students learning how to fly with an instructor learn how to level the plane without any aid such as this. So when it comes time to move to their next plane they will have the skills needed to successfully fly that plane. However, the student learning with this device never develops these basic skills and when it's time to move to a next plane they don't have the necessary skills needed to successfully fly it. This leave them to either try and fly it and crash it, move the leveling device to the next plane, or to simply stay on their trainer.

While the marketing hype for this device makes it sounds like a great tool to help, it actually does far more harm in the training of a student than it ever helps.

You won't need anything like this to keep a glider level. Most gliders are rudder only and the dihedral in the wing will keep the glider level. You won't have to do anything to level the wings at all.

Ken

maybe it is just a phase I am going through where I am having fun seeing how long I can stay up. I avoid the sore neck by leaning back in comfy chair on my patio. seems kind of dull when compared to my glow plane, but for some reason I am really enjoying it for now.

I just have timers on my tx and do not have any telemetry devices.

Recently I have been getting all kinds of tossed around and have to pretty much give constant rudder inputs. But often it gets so high I really not sure which way I am being tossed around.

I expect I could thermal more efficiently if my wings were dead-on level wing. Right now I often cannot tell if I am nearly dead-on level or banking 15-degrees. Maybe these leveling devices are not precise enough to keep a plane anymore than 15 or 20 degrees level? I do not know.

They're definitely not precise. They consider the brightest thing they see (hopefully but not guaranteed to be the sun) to be an indicator of which way is up and the darkest thing they see (the ground usually but not always) is assumed to be straight down. So using it to keep a plane level probably won't work very well unless you're flying over a grass field with no concrete sidewalks (those confuse it) or reflective surfaces like snow or water, and only at noon when the sun is straight up. They're capable of helping a self-leveling trainer with lots of dihedral flip over when it accidently becomes inverted most of the time, but I wouldn't count on it to actually hold the wings anywhere near level.

And on a side note... Do these things even do anything to level the wings? On a trainer when ya get in trouble you're supposed to reduce throttle and release the sticks so control surfaces go neutral. For some reason I'm thinking that the leveling system in my super cub just replicated that behavior by cutting throttle and stopping me from giving stick input. Certainly not a useful behavior for most planes.

It amazes me how some folks prefer mounting one of these to a plane that essentially flies slower and typically has a longer glide ratio than most low-wing trainers. What's wrong with just learning how to use a rudder? It's there to help stear, right? Also, I had to go back and re-read the first post. I'm assuming that Jacked69 started with a Nexstar, and is wanting to use the device first on the Pulse, then on the TF Mustang. Would that be correct?

NorfolkSouthern

Gliders are so inherently stable you don't need one of these stabilizing devices. Once trimmed properly a glider will just hand there at the max. L/D and slowly decent. I've gone so far as to kick a little bit of rudder trim into my 2M gliders just to let them fly in the thermals on their own - more like a free flight plane. It your glider is getting too hard to see then thermal hop to keep it a bit lower.

Hogflyer

JohnBuckner - i agree, John, that nothing replaces proper training. if this system encourages someone to solo without a capable instructor, then it should be avoided. even worse, if it requires fine tuning while in the air. the most stressful time of a maiden is when you get that plane up in the air and it's out of trim. moving your fingers off the stick to trim is about the craziest times, particularly if you're using digital trims where you can't just move the trims more than a click at a time. i can see how not being able to even adjust the leveling system would completely throw someone off.

RCKen - while i agree that a crutch could hinder training, it does help initial learning. a trainer is fairly stable and releasing the sticks on any trainer usually allows the plane to right and level itself. moving on to a low wing this inherent stability is gone. would you argue that the trainer's stability hindered his progress?

i think the issue is that the automatic leveling system is flawed not in theory but in practice. having an aid is not the issue but having an aid that introduces risk is.

This is my suggestion. It's passive and its sure to work! Original picture by MinnFlyer. Maybe not the best solution but it might be worth considering maybe using weights around the wheels to bring the CG down as far as possible, thus increasing the righting moment of the trainer. :-)

This is where I will disagree. While you say that it helps in initial training, that is where I will say that it hurts the most. During the initial training is where the most impact will happen in any pilots training. And for a pilot teaching themselves this is even more prevalent. When teaching themselves they will go with whatever works, meaning keeping their planes from crashing. And if that means letting go of the sticks so the leveling system kicks in and saves the plane then that is what they are going learn to do. This is just plain bad training techniques. In contrast, when I am teaching a new student in the first stages of training I constantly teach them what do to. Yes, I have to take over and "save" the plane quite a bit in the beginning of them learning. But since I am in charge I can choose when to take over. So what I do is first try to talk the student through saving the plane themselves, and when it's apparent that it's not going to happen I will take over and recover the plane. By doing this the student is constantly "learning" that they need to save the plane, and learning HOW to save the plane in the process. As they progress in their training they will learn that I am going to slowly work them to the point that they need to save the plane on their own.

Yes, trainers are "technically" self-righting on their own. But in practical terms, if a plane is in an awkward position and you let go of the sticks the plane is more than likely going to hit the ground LONG before it rights itself.

Ken

I still agree with Ken. Also that the
system is a "Crutch" (From My first Reply)
Would you use such a System to Solo In
a Full Scale ?


Bob


Edit, for Spelling,