A lesson learned - Invisible rider with foot on right rudder

Marc Lattoni wrote:
Took a brief tour of the foothills of the Rockies this morning in a club
172.

Right from the get go I discovered a phantom rider with a foot on the right
rudder. A real pain, particularly when landing. It took a great amount of
left rudder to land the plane.

Turns out the rudder trim tab was bent out of shape. Bent to the right just
about as much as all the others in the fleet were bent to the left so it did
not seem out of place.

Sure will check that more carefully on my next pre-flight.

I don't fly Cessnas, so I probably don't understand, but my intuition tells me a
rudder trim tab bent to the right would be applying *left* rudder. Can someone
explain how Cessna trim tabs work?

Remove SHIRT to reply directly.

Dave

Dave Butler wrote:

I don't fly Cessnas, so I probably don't understand, but my intuition
tells me a rudder trim tab bent to the right would be applying *left*
rudder. Can someone explain how Cessna trim tabs work?

That's correct, at least with regards to the post-1998 Cessna 172s. The
tab is on the trailing edge of the rudder, so bending it left will apply
slight right rudder and vise-versa.

--
Peter










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Marc Lattoni wrote:

Took a brief tour of the foothills of the Rockies this morning in a club
172.

Right from the get go I discovered a phantom rider with a foot on the right
rudder. A real pain, particularly when landing. It took a great amount of
left rudder to land the plane.

Turns out the rudder trim tab was bent out of shape. Bent to the right just
about as much as all the others in the fleet were bent to the left so it did
not seem out of place.

Sure will check that more carefully on my next pre-flight.

I love posts like this. It falls in to the category of "wow, I'm glad
somebody else learned that lesson before it happened to me, and was
thoughtful enough to pass along the experience".

I'm a new pilot, and never realized bending the trim tab like that could
effect flight characteristics so much.

Thanks
DanH