ORIGINAL: cfircav8r

TruBlu02, I am sure you get it, but your choice of words can be misleading. The plane will not automatically weathervane due to wind. A better way to put it would be to say you compensate for the fact that the wind is carrying (not pushing as this implies a side load) your plane in a direction other than your heading, so you change your heading to compesate for this. This gives you the crab angle and can feel mostly automatic for an experienced pilot. For the newer pilots you need to understand that in this crab the ''relative wind'' or the ''wind'' that the airplane feels, is still directly off the nose if you are not applying rudder, yet you will still be crabbing.