On May 17, 3:45*am, Mxsmanic wrote:
Dudley Henriques writes:
Generally speaking, you will establish level flight with pitch, adjust
the power, and trim the airplane. At this point level flight is
maintained by extremely subtle and ever constant "caressing" in pitch.

How sensitive is the trim? *I find myself wondering this as I adjust trim in
the sim. *The sim seems a bit coarse, although I'm doing much better at
holding altitude in the C182 (which has no altitude hold for the autopilot)
than I was doing a week or two ago.

When I leave the runway, the aircraft (C182 or C172) seems to climb very
briskly with take-off trim set. *After climbing a few hundred feet I find that
I must hold the stick forward and trim nose down significantly in order to get
the aircraft to level off a bit. *This is with full throttle (and pitch all
the way forward, in the C182). *I'm not sure if I should just continue
trimming to level flight with the throttle set forward, or back off on the
throttle substantially to maintain altitude. *I also don't know if this brisk
climb behavior (with full tanks but just me and equal-weight ballast in the
right seat) is typical of the actual aircraft (I have had mixed replies to my
various inquiries).

I know you are supposed to use the stick to adjust to the correct
altitude and then trim but I must admit to cheating a bit and just
playing with the trim only until I get the altitude nailed. And I am
very curious about what you use for ballast in the right seat Mx? Are
you using one of those "Skyguy" co-pilot dummies with the uniform
that you get from the pilot shop? I used to have one myself but it
was a pain carrying it around , so now I just use an 80 kg block of
lead, since it was the densest object I could find. Do you know of
anything denser so it wont take up as much room in my flight bag?
Thanks
Terry
PPL Downunder