Reply To: Brunner review by Austin

[cloudavionics]

This review is flawed. As someone who has spent well in excess of £5k on flight controls for a commercial simulator over the last two years, I can tell you now, your options for a realistic yoke in this world are very limited. Brunner is the closest you’re going to get, and not at the cheap end of the range either.

When Austin started talking about vibrations in the yoke as a result of prop RPM etc, I started thinking “has the guy actually flown a 172?”

We have disabled engine vibrations on the Brunner yoke for our commercial C172. The real thing just does not vibrate the yoke in your hand to the point that you even notice it, maybe a little bit but not enough to have the feature enabled on a force feedback yoke. If it does, then it’s very minimal or there is something seriously wrong with your aircraft. The Internal cables and pulleys connected to the flight controls and the yoke in a real 172 are not attached to the engine or the engine mounts. Vibrations from the engine are more prevalent in the cockpit dash and gauges, not the yoke. Especially in flight. The main effect the prop will have on the yoke is on the elevator. And that is not a “vibration”. When you start the engine, the yoke will push out and might flop a bit as the prop wash travels over the elevator. That’s the closest you’ll get to a “vibration”.

We have spent a lot of time at the flying school to get our yoke to act similar to the Cessnas we have sitting outside. I will publish our profile to the profile cloud soon. But the most important aspect we feel is the feedback feel of the yoke. More to the point:

1. Does the yoke return to the natural point in line with the elevator position when manipulated, especially on the pitch axis?
2. Does the yoke get progressively harder to pull the further you pull the yoke handle towards you? Does it get heavier? If not, it’s no good.
3. Does trip affect the yoke’s position? If not, and you have a force feedback yoke, it makes trim obsolete.
4. Is the pressure on the yoke less in low speed than at high speed?
5. Minimal back pressure is required in a turn. Am I able to keep altitude in a steep turn without having to look at the VSI, but through feeling on the yoke and the horizon position?

We have tuned our C172 profile to meet all of the 5 points above. Austin covered almost no aspects of what is important with a sim yoke. It’s embarrassing really. Making a huge deal out of a feature that IMHO should be disabled for the C172 (engine vibrations and turbulence effects on flight controls), sidetracked the whole review and cost him massive credibility in my books. Enabling engine vibration on the yoke detracts from the flying experience as it’s not realistic in any configuration, even if you were to use the “correct variables” as Austin suggests.

If you want to do a video review or comment on what you think the yoke should be doing, make sure you have at least 30 hours of flying the real thing hands-on. If you don’t have that experience, then your point of reference is simply “your opinion” and it’s fundamentally flawed. We have two instructors at the flying school where our C172 sim is based, one with over 17,000 hours helping us tune this thing. After trying 2 other yokes (and literally throwing one of them in the bin), the Brunner CLS-E MK II (not tried the B) is the only thing that comes remotely close to what we need in certifying this sim.

If you want to get to know the flaws of your simulator setup, get some real-world, high time pilots, and PPL students to start paying for time on your sim. Their feedback will be blunt and believe me, thought-provoking. I’ve been there. Austin’s opinion is worthless to me at this point. He can spend the next 6 months “working” with Stefan if he likes to get “the correct formula” for yoke vibrations, but I for one won’t be using that feature. It’s just not how the real thing feels. Sorry.

Regards

Rynardt Spies