Ta 152

[EagleDNY]

RE: the Wright Field postwar flight testing of a captured Ta-152.  Does anyone have a link to this report?  I'd like to read it. 

[BnZs]

  We maneuver these planes in ways that were never tested back in the day. 

I believe you are wrong on this point. These were young, testosterone-charged men. They did everything imaginable while "hassling" and then some. Chuck Yeager deliberately *topped a tree* with the wing of his  P-39 once.

[grizz441]

The plane falls out of the AH skies more than it lands. It's one of the few that couldn't be air-spawned in-game (before the level airspawns) because even when loaded lightly it was tail spin all the way into the ground from 15k, 20k, whatever. That happened many a time to me

I used to be quite good at recovering from stalls in the ta152, that is, ANY stall.  40k is not needed, maybe 2-3k.  I went to the TA tonight to brush up on stall recoveries from the 10k bases.  The first sortie I realized I had completely forgotten how to recover and I fell bellybutton backwards 10k into the ground.  After half an hour of practice I could recover EVERY single stall with as little as 2-3k altitude below me.  All it took was a little practice and to "feel" the imbalance and get your nose thrown around and pushed towards the ground.  Maybe you should try practicing before saying:

The plane falls out of the AH skies more than it lands. It's one of the few that couldn't be air-spawned in-game (before the level airspawns) because even when loaded lightly it was tail spin all the way into the ground from 15k, 20k, whatever. That happened many a time to me. When in these tail slides, tail spins, whatever you want to call them, you cannot recover. Not with 40,000 feet below you.

Film of 6 or 7 stall recoveries in a row before I got bored available upon request.

[STEELE]

Request.   

[grizz441]

http://www.speedyshare.com/files/28919276/stallfilmforkrusty_0000.ahf

I was using my gear but even that is not required I have since learned.  I can't explain the rudder inputs it's kind of just natural, but the basic start to recovery is full flaps down, throttle at zero. Then rocking the throttle between 0 and 40.  The plane will flip eventually (And you might need to use some elevator and aileron input at this point to "force" it to flip). Once it does that just feel the balance and get the nose down and steady for airspeed.

[EagleDNY]

http://www.speedyshare.com/files/28919276/stallfilmforkrusty_0000.ahf

I was using my gear but even that is not required I have since learned.  I can't explain the rudder inputs it's kind of just natural, but the basic start to recovery is full flaps down, throttle at zero. Then rocking the throttle between 0 and 40.  The plane will flip eventually (And you might need to use some elevator and aileron input at this point to "force" it to flip). Once it does that just feel the balance and get the nose down and steady for airspeed.

Looked like a pretty straightforward recovery to me, but the film isn't showing me any external control surface movements except for the flaps. 

[Krusty]

I finally had time to review the film (sorry put it on my to do list never got to it).

Grizz, most of your stalls there aren't the nasty one I was referring to. A couple come close where you are starting to move tail down, but in these it's almost as if there is no rudder or elevators when it happens. Also in the ones I'm thinking of you are travelling straight down. That's the straight-as-an-arrow stall, pointed tail into the ground. You seem to have some aileron control but you just roll about to no effect. The other is like your pancake, and you got into an oscillating stall ever-so-briefly that was getting close to another of the stalls I was talking about.

I think your film is quite telling too, that there is a greater problem at work. Most of your arse-first slides begin over 130mph. This is MORE than enough airflow over the surfaces to retain control. It's as if your entire tail feathers stopped existing. You'll note as well that in your pancake floats you're actually flying quite fast along a vector that doesn't seem aerodynamically possible. It really seems to me like the forces at work on the tail are not registering like they should be.

You have to force this situation getting down to 80mph at times, but when you get into it you're almost instantly accelerating past 130+mph in most cases. Check the speeds. I don't thnk it's possible to butt-slide forward with your wings flat against the wind and yet still accelerate consistently.

The physics aren't holding up here. You're presenting a flat surface to the wind at a significant speed. That alone would cause the stabilizers to catch the wind, and like an arrow in flight correct your path into the wind.

To top it off, the tail slides should have quite a lot of rudder authority, with a full 2000 hp or prop wash whipping past it, but they have almost no effect. Same for the elevators. Then when you actually shift towards straight-down tail-first flight, they should be MOST effective, as they are biting directly into the wind at speeds over 110mph. It should whip you around so fast you risk ripping your plane to pieces.


Instead, nothing. Your film is most helpful in illustrating that things aren't working as they should, although those weren't quite the unrecoverable stalls I had in mind.


I really think HTC has to look into this again. It really is defying physics to fly flat into the wind at increasing speeds and not have any of the benefits tail surfaces bring to air frames.

[grizz441]

I will climb to 20k and get myself in the nastiest tail slide ever and fall for 5k before I even attempt to recover.  Then post the film. 

[Babalonian]

I've been reading this thread for a while, play nice you guys, if my own suspicion is correct you'll hopefuly meet in the middle. 

I think the Ta-152 is over-unstable in the game, as Krusty has been saying with no fuel in the rear and a heavy supply of it up front which is odd, and it's not because of how hard it is to recover from its nasty stall or how easy it is to induce one (this is rediculous to me, it's like complaining that tyeing your shoes is too hard, after the age of 6 and practicing it a thousand times, anyone can do it blindfolded).  Should it be as stable or more-so than a 190D, I doubt it, but fly it regularly and agressively enough and you won't come up short with plenty of what I describe as highly odd instances of unstable flight behavior.

[EagleDNY]

That's why I would love to read that postwar flight testing report and see if they had any similar issues.

[Debrody]

Tryed out the 152 today in offline, with 25% fuel.
Thats still 9 minutes in the MA, the weight you wanna enter a last turnfight with and get one more kill on thyat pony. I was at low altituder, under 10K.
The aircraft could turn fairly well (by feeling), able to do some wicked reversals, hammerheads, even some minor tailslides. I had to provocate badly and do a line of mistakes to make her flat stall. It took 5k to recover, but im not familiar with this plane, i bet Sukov could solve it in 10 seconds.
What i have to say, it was better than what i expected, still not a 109, but fairly OK. Only thing this plane hates is the snaproll, but thats predictable seeing the long wings.
   Then i tryed the same moves with 95% fuel. What a difference! Almost no warning before the unstoppable flat-stall, i wasnt able to do any complex move. That full rear tank did its job, i couldnt recover and hit the ground after a 8K fall upside down.

[VonMessa]

Step on the ball... 

[Babalonian]

I putzed around in it for a bit last night and had a typical evening flying it.  Induced a few instabilities that I recovered from repeatedly (the first one always being the trickiest, hehe).  But nothing terrible, all were recovered using flaps and throttle only and I had an empty aft tank each time.

Only had one real odd-ball instability I wish I had recorded just for reference here.  In going with assuming pilot error above anything with the model or game, it was more of a slow wingover if I recall correctly than the intended aggressive and high-angled yo-yo that I was going for.  What had me cursing and spitting at it though was that I still had forward momentum, and as I performed the wingover I got my nose down for maybe a good 2-3 full adrenaline filled seconds.  I had the forward momentum still (I didn't try or had any intention to float a stall or intentionally induce a tail-first stall to the ground), and I had the nose pointed down with a full forward tank, dry aft, and a combined balance of ~75%-50% the fuel still in both my wing tanks (why I really wish I filmed, I wonder if my flubbed wing-over may of been heavily influenced by the fuel distribution in my wings during the slow speed maneuver), throttle firewalled and WEP cranking, 90-100% ammo loadout still in the guns... and then it starts to happen, nose down, wind consistently through the maneuver flowing over the surfaces, arguably predominantly nose-heavy, and that mother !@#$!@g tail that's up in the air behind me with my forward momentum now heading towards the ground teetered my tail down and my nose up like the dang thing was loaded with 50,000 pounds of bricks in the tail. 

These are the odd-ball instances of instability in the 152's flight model that really get me upset because even if the conditions were right for it to possibly of happened (ie: I was actually 10-20mph slower than I actually thought and maybe tried to wingover with my heaviest wing of the two being forced to be held high), it's wacky model will overridingly defy the odds of physics (heavy-nose due to fuel distribution and ammo, nose-down, momentum already heading forward in that direction, massive blender grasping at the air in that same general direction...) and do it anyways sometimes...

The irony of it all being that the solution to this problem/stall, was dumping flaps, forcing through flaps and ginger/light applications of throttle and the harnessing of the teetering momentum of the stall, and getting my nose and even less momentum than before the stall was induced down towards the ground to recover.  How should that stall be recoverable due to this means when more than twice those same factors used for preventing and recovering from the stall (forward momentum and thrust) were already present and in place before being overridden by the inducing of the stall?

To try and simplify, I'm gonna compare the tail stall of the 152 to getting your tire on your car stuck in a mud hole.  When 100% throttle and 15mph of forward momentum get you sunk and stuck in the same mud hole every single time, how does it make sense that bouncing 20-40% throttle and utilizing the forward momentum of 2-3mph can and will get you out of that hole every single time?  <- Makes sense (or not, I hope)?


Edit: spell checker is my friend.

[kilo2]

I putzed around in it for a bit last night and had a typical evening flying it.  Induced a few instabilities that I recovered from repeatedly (the first one always being the trickiest, hehe).  But nothing terrible, all were recovered using flaps and throttle only and I had an empty aft tank each time.

Only had one real odd-ball instability I wish I had recorded just for reference here.  In going with assuming pilot error above anything with the model or game, it was more of a slow wingover if I recall correctly than the intended aggressive and high-angled yo-yo that I was going for.  What had me cursing and spitting at it though was that I still had forward momentum, and as I performed the wingover I got my nose down for maybe a good 2-3 full adrenaline filled seconds.  I had the forward momentum still (I didn't try or had any intention to float a stall or intentionally induce a tail-first stall to the ground), and I had the nose pointed down with a full forward tank, dry aft, and a combined balance of ~75%-50% the fuel still in both my wing tanks (why I really wish I filmed, I wonder if my flubbed wing-over may of been heavily influenced by the fuel distribution in my wings during the slow speed maneuver), throttle firewalled and WEP cranking, 90-100% ammo loadout still in the guns... and then it starts to happen, nose down, wind consistently through the maneuver flowing over the surfaces, arguably predominantly nose-heavy, and that mother !@#$!@g tail that's up in the air behind me with my forward momentum now heading towards the ground teetered my tail down and my nose up like the dang thing was loaded with 50,000 pounds of bricks in the tail. 

These are the odd-ball instances of instability in the 152's flight model that really get me upset because even if the conditions were right for it to possibly of happened (ie: I was actually 10-20mph slower than I actually thought and maybe tried to wingover with my heaviest wing of the two being forced to be held high), it's wacky model will overridingly defy the odds of physics (heavy-nose due to fuel distribution and ammo, nose-down, momentum already heading forward in that direction, massive blender grasping at the air in that same general direction...) and do it anyways sometimes...

The irony of it all being that the solution to this problem/stall, was dumping flaps, forcing through flaps and ginger/light applications of throttle and the harnessing of the teetering momentum of the stall, and getting my nose and even less momentum than before the stall was induced down towards the ground to recover.  How should that stall be recoverable due to this means when more than twice those same factors used for preventing and recovering from the stall (forward momentum and thrust) were already present and in place before being overridden by the inducing of the stall?

To try and simplify, I'm gonna compare the tail stall of the 152 to getting your tire on your car stuck in a mud hole.  When 100% throttle and 15mph of forward momentum get you sunk and stuck in the same mud hole every single time, how does it make sense that bouncing 20-40% throttle and utilizing the forward momentum of 2-3mph can and will get you out of that hole every single time?  <- Makes sense (or not, I hope)?


Edit: spell checker is my friend.

I didn't realize until the thread a while back but the 152 will recover hands off most of the time just not very quickly. I know what your talking about with the nose down thing if you push negative G and pull the throttle back slowly you will continue in the dive. If you remain full throttle your tail will fall behind you.

[STEELE]

It seems we had the same (or very similar) problem with the Mossie, tail down or spinning stall of death, brought on from the same basic AoA.
And what was done to correct it?
1st correct answer wins a prize!  

(Hopefully the 152 gets a similar fix, but who knows since it's an 3v!L @xi$ ride)