Fliers - what causes them? How to minimize their occurrence?

Personally I think 90% of flyers are Trigger Control. Practice and maintain correct pull and follow thru and they will disappear.

I agree that trigger pull and index finger position is very well the cause bigtinboat is correct in my book but bent scirt will also result in a ooooopsie 

I agree that trigger pull and index finger position is very well the cause bigtinboat is correct in my book but bent skirt will also result in a ooooopsie 

Flyers... yes, they can be a shooter problem. They can also be:

1. improper crown on the end of the barrel.

2. dirty or rough bore.

3. less expensive pellets which are dented, distorted, badly aligned between the nose and the skirt. There are high speed videos which show a series of shots, with the fliers spiraling, and the good shots going straight. 

4. a modification of the shooter problem, a wide eyebox on a scope, with poor head alignment and bad parallax adjustment (or no adjustment for parallax).

5. God punishing you for kicking that kitten as a small child.

They are caused by different pellet weights and skits sizes. https://youtu.be/wRaoZkxwSOw

You can aslo do the roll test: https://youtu.be/_o0vq__b60g

If that doesn't work try adjusting the "Nut behind the trigger"

Well all on that plus a slight change in " conditions" 

I think Addertooth's number 5 is on the money. Made me smile. Seriously now I also found flyers I have encountered are with non regulated guns as pressures move out of the sweet spot. This is in addition to all the points made about shooter control.

I think Addertooth's number 5 is on the money. Made me smile. Seriously now I also found flyers I have encountered are with non regulated guns as pressures move out of the sweet spot. This is in addition to all the points made about shooter control.

Does anyone have a link to a good trigger control tutorial. I could ALWAYS use a few pointers 

Flyers are part of the game. If you want to minimize them, you're gonna have to sort, weigh, measure head size, and roll your pellets. The simplest thing to do is to make sure you don't have any bent pellet skirts, nick's, and deformations on the pellet heads. You can do a simple test if you have a chronograph to check for pellet weight inconsistencies. Try shooting a 25 meter benchrest target (one shot each target) using your chronograph. For example, if you get a flyer on your fourth target, check the FPS on your chrony on shot #4 to see if there's a severe drop or increase in FPS. Here's an example of the target you can use...

I have shot many pellets with bent skirts and most of them have gone through the same hole as the shot before. JSB Diablo pellets are pretty soft and I think that they fire-form to the barrel. I've also fired shots over the chrono. at repeat speeds and had fliers. Some tins may give 1 in 20-30 and some tins 2 in 10. I don't wash or lube, I'm happy with the accuracy straight from the tin. Fliers are a fact of life for airguns.

If you use these in .177 you will NEVER get a flier, to me that proves it's the pellet. Sadly they dont produce them in .22, so IMO .22 will never shoot as well from pellets out of the tin.

Any kind of wind or breeze.

Any kind of wind or breeze.

Click to expand...

Correctamundo

I also know from personal experience that an oddball loose fitting pellet will be a flier. Back when the boxed Crosman Premiers had QC issues (around die #7) I would toss out a CPL that was undersized and visually dropped too deep into the .177 R9 leade and reload another. If the replacement pellet visually sat at the proper height in the leade it would be pushed home and shot.

The reason I stopped using both 8.4 grain JSB Exacts and the 8.64 grain H&N FTT was that the pellet fit from almost snug to LOOSE in my .177 R9 leade was too variable and I got a lot of UNEXPLAINED fliers! Due to the variation of "fit in the leade" for these two pellet brands I literally measured (and sorted) a few thousand. While I'm sure that measuring pellet heads with a digital caliper was/is rather crude, even after developing a "measuring technique", I also found that the sort was accurate enough so the sorted groups did fit the leade consistently............







LOL.....when I tried to head size supposedly 4.52mm JSB Exacts with my 4.50mm home lapped die it was pretty much a waste of time because a large percentage of the pellets already had head sizes less than 4.50mm and very few were even 4.52mm. I measured a tin of 8.4 grain Air Arma dome pellets and found that a much larger percentage than the Exacts actually measured 4.52mm.

Anywhoo.....I do admit that most of my fliers are "shooter induced" considering that I still get fliers using my .177 CPLs that are head sized to 4.50mm and weighed!



While I found the sizing of CPL pellet heads to 4.48mm or 4.50mm was useful to minimize the "sore loading finger" from shoving unsized 4.53mm-4.55mm CPL heads into my tight leade .177 HW95, I also found that weighing the CPLs was a waste of time since the weight variation from absolute lightest to the absolute heaviest CPL was only .38 grain and it's a "pain in the butt" to weigh pellets!

Calibrating my scale with accuracy ADVERTISED to be .001 gram (0.015gr).........





LOL......I also found it interesting that most "7.9 grain CPLs" were heavier than 7.9 grains weighing in at 8.00gr-8.06gr........



Bottom line..........I personally believe that most of MY fliers are due to "trigger slappin' instead of squeezin".