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The torque rolling problem applied to many high powered WWII era planes. On aircraft carriers, many planes were lost when cobbing the power at low speed to wave off an approach or on going to full power after a bolter (missing all the arresting wires on angle deck carriers). The huge radial engines on many of the fighters and bombers of that era had outputs ranging up to 3,000 horsepower. At slow speed, the torque generated by a rapid application of full power could very quickly flip the plane on its back when insufficient aerodynamic force was available to counter it. At slow speeds, only judicious addition of power kept the blue side up.
The advent of jets eliminated the problem of torque roll while adding the new dynamic Wally Bestgen described of turbine lag, where there was often a several second delay from commanded thrust and the actual spool up of the turbine to sufficient RPM to provide it. The reason for the delay (forgive me if this is old news) is the fuel control unit metering the additional fuel to the combustors at a rate slow enough to prevent overtemping the turbine components, which would quickly result if fuel was controlled strictly by the throttle. The turbine needs to spool up at a controlled rate to introduce sufficient additional intake air to the additional fuel flow to prevent an overtemp. Split spool engines, such as most Pratt & Whitney and GE engines, have quicker response times than single spool. The Rolls Royce RB211 engine, which is used on some 757's and 747's actually has three spools and has the fastest response time of any turbine engine I've flown. But I digress...
In turboprops, the propellor re-introduced the torque issue to the equation. Piston drivers who are used to instantaneous response when adding throttle are prone to keep adding more throttle to their turbine engines when they experience a lag and when it all comes at once, the result can be quite a shock, if not downright deadly. One must have the discipline to operate the throttle judiciously and more importantly, to keep adequate speed on the airplane and RPM on the engine on approach.
The slow side of the envelope is very definitely not a place you want to be when driving behind a turbine engine and that's doubly true if it's turning a propellor.
Skip Slater
N540ES
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