You have AOA lift and airspeed lift that you have to balance out to maintain level flight or a desired rae of climb/descent. The SUREST over time way to increase lift is to add power. If you change nothing else but add power the plane Will climb, even if the nose appears to be pointed slightly downwards sometimes. This is why pilots often say "use power for altitude"
The Quickest way to increase lift is by increasing the angle of attack(pitch). This points the nose up and the plane will start ballooning up. The problem with this is that if you change nothing else but increase AOA the plane will briefly climb, but will also gain much drag which will reduce the airspeed(and the lift generated by it), causing the plane to sink eventually. This is why pilots often say "use pitch for airspeed".
This is the overall result, yes.
Now really, like I said before, you are balancing out the two sources of lift all the time but following the above "rules" helps people stay out of trouble.
There really is only one
source of lift - the wing. However, there are three main factors affecting how much lift the wing produces (at a given altitude):
-airspeed (most important one, lift is proportional to square of airspeed)
-angle of attack (the easiest to control immediately, like you said)
-coefficient of lift (changing the shape of the wing with flaps, slats, or spoilers)
Since controlling angle of attack has much better response time than controlling airspeed, that is used for maneuvering the aircraft, in conjunction with using the throttles to maintain airspeed.
Drag of the aircraft is also dependant of similar parametres:
-airspeed (again, drag is approximately proportional to square of airspeed at typical reynolds numbers for aircraft)
-angle of attack (the attitude of aircraft relative to airflow)
-coefficient of drag (changing the shape of the aircraft with flaps, slats, spoilers, landing gear, radiator or cowling flaps)
So, since angle of attack controls drag in addition to lift, it can also be used to control airspeed - or, if you want to maintain airspeed while using higher angle of attack, you need to counter increased drag with more thrust.
This, of course, is why you need to add power when you're turning, in order to retain your airspeed and altitude. And also why there's a difference between transient and sustained turn performance - you can only sustain a turn if your aircraft's engine can provide enough thrust to counter the increased drag.
Technically speaking you must control both airspeed and angle of attack in conjunction to get the desired results. In a sustained climb or sustained descent, the reversal of "obvious" controls becomes apparent, and indeed the glideslope depends on engine power and airspeed depends on angle of attack, but that doesn't change the fact that the lift from wings is the primary source of controlling the aircraft's direction, whether the amount of lift is changed due to increased airspeed, angle of attack, or coefficient of lift.
The situation is slightly more complicated because in a descent, the aircraft is being accelerated by gravity and so it needs to counter that with some additional drag (opposite to a sustained climb, where the aircraft must compensate for gravity losses with additional engine power).
In general aviation (I've never flown a P-36 unfortunately) if the pilot adds flaps this increased the AoA lift so the plane balloons up, and then slows down quickly, unless the pilot anticipates this and is ready with some nose-down pressure to prevent excessive ballooning. I'm not the most experienced pilot in the world by far but in each plane that I have (C152, DA20, PA28, PA44, C172, C182) flown, this happens to some extent or another. Flaps probably should make the nose balloon up in game
And they do exactly that, precisely as you would expect. Although, technically speaking the flaps increase the coefficient of lift, but the end result is that the wing produces more lift than aircraft's weight, so without the pilot reducing angle of attack, the aircraft has no choice but to go up.
That's exactly the reason why I think ManOWar's criticism of flaps in IL-2 is somewhat excessive. Clearly since all simulators are approximations of nature, it probably isn't perfectly accurate, but I think it's much better than ManOWar's comments would imply.
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Topic: P-36 and applying flaps (Read 14066 times)
