Originally posted by Angus
The late 109's could dive very very fast, and they were relatively quick in gaining the speed. They would AFAIK need to be trimmed out of the dive.
Rall has mentioned that the P47 was the first he met that could not be left behind.
The trick was a bit different, but I presume many aircraft used similiar ways before diving.
The 109 manual notes that the pilot shouldn't trim the plane into dive, ie. leave it on the normal cruise setting, and keep the stick pushed forwards slightly instead to compensate for the nose-up tendency.
When he wants to come out, if he simply releases the stick and it went back to neutral by the airflow, the nose-up trim pulled the plane up by itself, plus he could help it out with the elevator, and/or use more trim if thins go scary.
Trimming out from a dive heavily using the
Flosse has it's dangers, since it's the whole horizontal stabiliser that moves, being a much bigger area is far more effective than ordinary trim tabs on control surfaces - for this reason it's wasnt a particularly bad feature that since it was hand operated (it was electric on the FW190 iirc), the forces prevented you from suddenly ripping your own tail off.
Another good feature of it that under compressibility it can be an effective way controlling the planeess, under conditions where the elevator is useless (normal trim tabs only set the elevator, so are useless in this case just as well).
