Brett, I hadn't considered that either. My inside is still going lean and my outside a hair rich. I didn't connect those dots till you mentioned that.
On a flapped airplane, particularly classic airplanes, going lean/speeding up (or slowing down less) stiffens the controls, going rich/slowing down (or slowing down more) softens them, so that's about what I would guess. The speed of the control response (that is, moving the controls through angle alpha to get a particular turn rate/radius) hardly changes with speed, but the load changes drastically, so the effect is that the controls feel "stiff" when it goes faster and "loose"/"easy" when it slows down.
Interestingly, the opposite usually happens on elevator-only airplanes. The control loads don't change much with speed, but the control response greatly increases with speed, so it tends to have the opposite effect.
Note that something similar happens even when the engine run is symmetrical - it always responds somehow, and depending on how it responds, it can drastically change the control response in both directions. I spent half the morning adjusting my engine run to be stiffer/less responsive*, the intent being to try to play that off against the CG and flap/elevator ratio.
The 2021 NATs, I had it *way* too flat, particularly on insides, which led to near-disaster in any sort of wind. Normally, I hope it's windy because I figure I have and advantage, but not in this case, and all the way up to the week before Golden State where Paul Walker and David Fitzgerald can attest I damn near stuck it in the ground on an inside triangle in about 10 mph wind. I radically changed the engine by the next weekend, and had no problem in the 20ish, in fact, the big problem was me overcompensating anticipating a problem that no longer existed.
Governor-only electric would run the same either way, it doesn't care, which is why they have such consistent control response. I would guess you can (and have to) adjust the same effect on accelerometer feedback systems, and tilting the accelerometer would affect the inside/outside difference.
Brett
*BTW, I was adjusting the engine run by making small changes to the oil content - adding 1/8 ounce to 1/4 ounce of oil to the regular Powermaster fuel took it from "too responsive" to bordering on "too flat". Note that this is about **1/16"** of movement on my 5 ounce fuel syringe - pull out a tiny bit of KL-198 oil from the bottle, suck up regular amounts of fuel into it, shake it up, fill the tank. So a barely detectable amount of oil, from 18% (no added oil) to 20% (1/8 ounce/1/16") to 22% (1/4 ounce/1/8") took the engine from too responsive to too flat, and would require different airplane trim. This was my sequence of events:
unmodified fuel (18% oil) - engine was backing off too much when unloaded, causing the airplane to "fall into" the corners and tend to come out, say, higher. I could ix this by moving the CG forward and/or by reducing the elevator movement WRT the flap, or, by reducing the engine response to load
Modified fuel (22% oil, regular fuel load +~1/4 ounce of KL-198) - Note that this emulates RO-Jett fuel, which I still have, but didn't have with me this morning due to lack of preparation. Flew this a few flights, and concluded it was not responding enough, which made the controls feel much stiffer than the unmodified fuel, and while it had beneficial effects on the positivity and predictability, it was a bit much and required excess effort for a desirable degree of turn. This could have been dealt with by moving the CG back and/or increasing the elevator movement WRT the flap, but that's a lot harder than changing the oil, particularly when time is short.
In-between (20% oil, regular fuel load +~1/8 ounce of KL-198) - This was better for the current state of trim of the airplane, had a workable combination of positivity in the corners and speed control. Whether it might be better overall with one of the previous fuel version and necessary trim adjustments is an interesting point.
I would also note that the engine was responding a bit harder in insides than outsides, which is the tendency of the RO-Jett 61 BSE "Brett" versions, and making the insides slightly stiffer than outsides, which I have already trimmed for and gotten used to (since it's been that way since 2003...).
Point being, this stuff really makes a difference, and while some people are at least somewhat aware of the effects, they do matter, and indicate why *how the engine runs* is so critical to everything else you do. And there are many degrees of freedom to play off against each other. If you *don't* have a good understanding of how these things play off against each other, the entire system looks like a random number generator and you do great on the flight it all happens to line up, and have random effects all the rest of the time. This is *greatly reduced* with modern power systems compared to the ancient types, so it is far better than it used to be.
Brett
Topic: Insides and outsides uneven. (Read 1520 times)