Tip stall is when the airflow detaches from the tip of the wing. On most backwards-sweep designs, tip stall also implies you partially or totally lose aileron control. To make things worse, tip stall will pretty much never occur in a symmetric way, so it causes the plane to yaw and roll out of control. Attempting to roll the plane back level only worsens the condition (due to asymmetric drag from the stalled tips) and instead gotta try to compensate with rudder when possible, or at least a combination of rudder and roll.
Tip stalls are usually not a big deal on a plane like the F-22 because you don't really lose roll control when the jet stalls, particularly if you have tailerons enabled.
That's not to say the plane can't depart controlled flight, but in the case of the F-22 that's more due to a lack of lateral stability once the vertical stabs get deprived from clean airflow due to building excessive angle of attack and not having ventral fins to compensate. #stealth
This said, you will more likely tip stall from planes being nose heavy than tail heavy. Nose heavy planes load more their wings, so you are constantly flying closer (in terms of AoA) to tip stalling. Having a nose heavy CG also makes corkscrewing dynamics much worse, further complicating tipstalls. So no, I don't think you experienced a tip stall on your F-22 because of being tail heavy. You probably just exceed too much AoA and lost directional stability.
If you had SAFE active, and being that an auto-level stabilization mode, chances are, once you lost speed, and hence, control authority, the plane started rolling and the gyro commanded counter-roll to compensate. In a near stall condition, counter roll will not actually produce a rolling outcome but instead a yawing in the opposite direction, what is used to flat spin these jets without thrust vectoring. Only you probably weren't commanding it consciously, but rather flying in SAFE mode turned out to be not that safe... I still encourage to use gyros in normal 'rate' stabilization mode and totally forget about auto level options (SAFE included) or just keep them for emergency situations in case you lose orientation. Flying with SAFE by default is outright dangerous IMO.
Tip stalls are usually not a big deal on a plane like the F-22 because you don't really lose roll control when the jet stalls, particularly if you have tailerons enabled.
That's not to say the plane can't depart controlled flight, but in the case of the F-22 that's more due to a lack of lateral stability once the vertical stabs get deprived from clean airflow due to building excessive angle of attack and not having ventral fins to compensate. #stealth
This said, you will more likely tip stall from planes being nose heavy than tail heavy. Nose heavy planes load more their wings, so you are constantly flying closer (in terms of AoA) to tip stalling. Having a nose heavy CG also makes corkscrewing dynamics much worse, further complicating tipstalls. So no, I don't think you experienced a tip stall on your F-22 because of being tail heavy. You probably just exceed too much AoA and lost directional stability.
If you had SAFE active, and being that an auto-level stabilization mode, chances are, once you lost speed, and hence, control authority, the plane started rolling and the gyro commanded counter-roll to compensate. In a near stall condition, counter roll will not actually produce a rolling outcome but instead a yawing in the opposite direction, what is used to flat spin these jets without thrust vectoring. Only you probably weren't commanding it consciously, but rather flying in SAFE mode turned out to be not that safe... I still encourage to use gyros in normal 'rate' stabilization mode and totally forget about auto level options (SAFE included) or just keep them for emergency situations in case you lose orientation. Flying with SAFE by default is outright dangerous IMO.
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