Hello everyone, I don’t know if it happens to me only but when I fly the A321 the plane starts to wobble at 200kts and below despite not being overweight. The airplane itself is beautiful and I would love to fly it more frequently. However, this issue i have been experiencing is a bit discouraging. Thanks for taking your time to read this post.
The a321 is known to have some stability issues. It is of low priority due to being an older model.
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Hi, also you might search under “A321 swaying” and “A321 rocking,” for quite a few topics on this.
Quick comments off the top of my head: You might decrease it by cruising at a lower altitude when at higher weights, and/or shutting off AP momentarily to stabilize manually before then re-engaging AP, and also maybe noting if frame rate seems like it is relatively low vs high (device performance related).
edit: if IAS (indicated airspeed) gets too low (for whatever altitude), it could also be a contributing factor to instability.
If you mean any ground related crosswind issue, that’s a bit of a different situation.
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I had similar and stuck the first level of flaps on and it sorted it (not that realistic tbh but it fixed it)
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Do you think you were at high enough cruise speed? (the first thing I think about with flaps having an effect; but not a sure thing of course)
I was going slowly than the optimum cruise speed as I wanted to arrive at a certain time
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This happened to me the other day. I tried slowing down and lowering my altitude because i thought it was the winds but nothing worked. Its frustrating becasue I would like to use the aircraft but it just wobbles violently so i always end up canceling the flight.
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I normally on climb with the a321 i keep flaps 1 until passing 210 kts and on decent I select flaps 1 and it flies beautifully I learned that trick from an actual Airbus 320 pilot also I would recommend you check v1 simulations on YouTube for any 320 family performance and it works like a charm
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Also remember flaps help you fly slower without getting into a almost stall that’s why we use flaps for departure
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I wish IF would just fix it but oh well
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This will usually make it worse. Especially at high altitudes when you are relatively heavy.
I know you mentioned you thought it was winds. Irl you might slow down to a safer speed to ride out turbulence, but here the problem is usually being below the most stable flying speed rather than how fast you encounter the “wind bumps.”
Also, for steady winds there will be no effect in any case.
I was just flying at fl330, fairly heavy, and I turned the temperature up a bit (makes the aircraft feel like it’s at an even higher altitude). It was pretty easy to get the wobbling even at fairly high speed.
Slowing down a bit made it a lot worse.
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You are absolutely right and I found out the hard way lol. I think it may be an issue with the physics of this model as someone pointed out. Maintaining the proper airspeed helped a little but not my much.
Not an expert on the A321, but isn’t 200kts too low for the aircraft at FL330? I mainly use this aircraft in Iberia routes, and always fly at 280kts below FL280, and M.078 above FL280. This is at medium weight settings mind you and at a lower altitude.
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If the plane is shaking your to high for that altitude try lowering to a lower level
I’ve noticed it wobbling when flying at higher altitudes 39000ft where the A320/19 would be steady.
If you’re light it would be fine at 390
Same here. I’ve used to fly an A321 with Condor from EBBR-KBOS and it was heavily rocking at FL360. FL300 and it’s fine.
Yeah, that’s true. But it doesn’t take much weight to make it start to wobble.
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If it is wobbeling you could descend, or just use Flaps 1.
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I had this a couple of minutes ago… Just wanted to climb slowly 500fps to FL370 and above FL360 it started wobbling… I went back to FL340 set LNAV off and on again… since then everything is fine 🤷🏻♂️
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