in this lesson we're going to be talking about why our airplane has a left turning tendency in case you weren't already aware when our airplanes at high angles of attack high power settings and low airspeed for some reason the airplane wants to turn left because of this when we take off or when we meet these conditions you'll find that you need to put right rudder pressure in to fix the problem let's look at a few reasons for that the first reason for this is torque reaction from the engine and the propeller to understand this we need to look at newton's third law of physics for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction now obviously you know that the propeller and the inside parts of the engine need to turn in order to create thrust but you might not have considered that reaction that affects our airplane so our propeller turns one direction that's our action then our airplane's reaction is to roll to the left one important thing to remember about torque reaction is that the more power you put in the bigger that reaction is going to be because of that torque reaction is strongest at high power settings you'll want to remember that a lot of times manufacturers will design the airplane so that you won't notice torque reaction during cruise most older airplanes are designed so that that left wing creates more lift when you're at the perfect cruising speed because of this if we slow the airplane down below cruising speed fork reaction will come back into play on newer airplanes they often offset the engine to counteract that torque reaction with weight instead this will help alleviate some of the torque reaction at low air speeds but not all of it the biggest things for you to remember about torque reaction today is that it's most powerful at high power settings low air speeds and high angles of attack now let's take a quick look at p factor if you look closely at the cross section of a propeller you'll notice that it works the same exact way as a wing as the propeller spins it creates a forward moving force called thrust when we're in straight level flight the angle of attack from the upward moving propeller and the downward moving propeller are the same because of this they both produce the same amount of thrust when we pitch the nose of our airplane up the downward moving propeller which is the one on the right side of most airplanes will have a higher angle of attack this will make that downward moving propeller have more thrust this will make our airplane yaw to the left in other words when we pitch the airplane up that downward moving propeller takes a bigger bite out of the air that bigger bike causes the airplane to yaw to the left so the thing to remember about p factor is that it's strongest at high angles of attack now let's take a look at the corkscrew effect this occurs when the propeller is moving very fast and the airplane's moving slow as the propeller spins to create thrust some of the wind spirals around the airplane it's called the spiraling slipstream as this air corps screws around the airplane it eventually hits the left side of the vertical fin this causes the airplane to yaw to the left the force on the left side of the fin also creates a right rolling moment but this is mostly offset by the torque effect when we increase our air speed the slipstream gets longer then at some point it's long enough to where it no longer hits the tail so because of that you can see that corkscrew effect is the greatest at slow air speeds and high power settings now let's take a quick look at something that's not necessarily a left turning tendency but it kind of falls in this category it's gyroscopic precession the propeller turns it acts somewhat like a gyroscope anytime an outside force acts on a gyroscope it's subject to a resultant force known as precession this force acts 90 degrees ahead of the applied force for example if we push our gyroscope up and it's turning to the right we'll get a resultant force that moves the gyroscope to the right like the gyroscope in the picture our airplane's propeller turns to the right so if we move the nose of our airplane we'll get a resultant force 90 degrees ahead of that movement an example of this is if we pitch the nose of our airplane up and our propellers moving to the right like we mentioned then we'll get a resultant force that pushes the nose of our airplane to the right too now i know at this point you guys are thinking big deal this is offset by the left turning tendencies but what you might not have considered is that this can be a pretty big factor in tailwheel airplanes because initially they need to pitch down on takeoff to get the tail wheel off the ground when they do this this is basically a left turning tendency for them too so now you can kind of see why we discussed this in this lesson so the big takeaways in this lesson are to remember the left turning tendencies torque effect p factor and corkscrew effect these are strongest at high angles of attack high power and low air speed also remember anytime we pitch or yaw the airplane we're subject to gyroscopic precession but it's particularly important in tailwheel airplanes hey thanks for joining me today on the free pilot training channel if you enjoyed this video today please smash that like button for me if you didn't i don't mind the dislike smash just let me know why you didn't like it as always don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell notification so you know when there's more free pilot training