Fl ight Testing Techniques
Airspeed Calibration Deck: Ground course preparation
By Ed Kolano
The airplane we were flying had a fly-by-wire flight control system. It automatically trimmed itself for 1g flight. No doubt the designers figured that would be a good starting point for every flight, and it was. You could trim if you wanted to with the hat switch atop the stick grip, but the gouge (slang for good unofficial information) was never to touch the trim. The reason
50 NO. 3/NOVEMBER 2012
was that the computer was thinking digital out to who knows how many decimal places, so there's no way to blip yourself back exactly to that initial 1g trim number. You could find that number buried in some maintenance page on one of the displays, but thumb-flicks were much too coarse even while watching the digits.
Illustration by Dave Matheny