Jacobs, I've always used the second method because it's much easier - you don't have to fight the autopilot because trimming disables it.

I don't totally agree with you. I learned to fly without the FD and now I just can't fly with it turned on.
You actually fight your own aircraft because you just don't trim (or don't trim enought). Trimming resets the point where the APs are trying to put you on, so if you trim you don't fight your Shark. I know that it is not as simple as that, but I suggest you to practice as much as you can on the trim. Focus on it, and every time you have the feeling the Ka-50 it's not doing what you would like, trim.



EinsteinEP, You've made my day LOL

I do what I can.


I don't like flying with the FD on either, but I think it makes great sense for folks who are struggling with intuitively understanding the Trimmer. It can be hard for a student pilot to differentiate between Trimmer and autopilot feedback - not all cases, granted, but many struggle with this problem. For those students, I *strongly* recommend flying with the FD on while learning to understand the Trimmer.

I would even suggest that it's good practice for "experienced" pilots to occasionally fly with the FD on just to reinforce and perfect trimming habits.

I think that the most difficult thing is to help new pilots to understand how the Trim works. A bit of immagination can be useful (it has been for me, at least).

If we can image the Shark as a sphere in the space, it becomes quite easy to understand the difference between trim effect and AP feedback. A sphere can go up, forward, spin around, etc. just as our Ka-50 can do (with some limits of course). Therefore, if we push the sphere it will go forward until we stop. What if we want to make it go forward forever? We should keep pushing it, isn't it? However, sooner or later we will get tired, so we need someone else to keep pushing. And this one is the Trim. It is nothing but "someone" who just keeps to do what we were doing.
And what if we would like to do something different, turn left, for example? If we were pushing our sphere, we should just push it on its right side. But we are not touching it, Trim is doing that for us. However, Trim has its own "rules" (APs) and it's quite "stubborn". It would like to keep doing its stuff, thus it will try to oppose to any change of direction (AP effects). Hence we have to find a solution: we can fight against it and then tell it what to do next (change direction and then press the trim button); we can ask it to take a break while we change direction (press and hold the trim button, change direction and the release the trim button) or just tell it to forget its rules and let us do what we want (turn on the FD).

I know that this example can sound a bit stupid (and english is neither my first language and thus makes harder to explain and understand), but I think that sometimes extracting concepts out of context can help to make them easier to understand.

If this is not understandable, I'll try to explain in a different way, if you want.

I use FD for extended flight maneuvers and turn it off, once I fly straight ahead again and only need to do minor course corrections.

If you do not use FD, I can't see how you would do more drastic maneuvers like a loop. Without FD, the autopilot would always try to push you back on course. And holding down the trimmer also is no alternative, since that would disable all stabilizing autopilot input.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=572028

xixi, pressing and holding the Trimmer button does NOT remove the stabilization, only the autopilot feedback.

The infamous Frazer Demo video should be all the proof you need of what is possible.

Interesting.. didn't know that... so basically the question then is, if you want to press and hold the trim button, or if you just turn FD on.

Thanks, I'll give the first option a try.

Although those are both workable options (pressing and holding the trim button down for the entire flight seems a bit excessive to me), there is a third option: learn to fly with the autopilot. It's certainly not impossible, but it takes a good understanding of Ka-50 helo dynamics, the Trimmer, and the autopilot systems.

As I said, I only use FD for maneuvers, for example for a sharp turn behind a building. Now that's probably too fast to make incremental adjustments to the autopilot via the trim button. Up to now, I always enabled FD before and disabled it afterwards.. seems a bit more comfortable, than holding the trim button down.

But as I said, I'll try and see how it feels without FD.

Ah. I think I misunderstood your initial comment: you were saying that you'll hold down the Trimmer button during a maneuver. This is exactly what I do. The other school of thought out there is to push then release the Trimmer once you get your desired setup. I prefer the mash, but the other solution works, too.