Originally Posted by Top_Gunn

The wind doesn't make a plane yaw. It just carries it in the direction the wind is blowing, without changing its heading at all. The car and sailboat analogies don't work, because they are not moving in a mass of air. The better analogy with a boat is a boat moving in a stream with a current. say you point the boat due east on a north-south stream with the water flowing south. If you row without turning, the bow of the boat will keep pointing east, but the boat will move sideways (relative to the ground) at tem miles an hour. It doesn't turn. A plane flying in a mass of moving air behaves the same way.

An airplane in coordinated flight "sees" wind only from straight ahead. Once off the ground, a plane in a steady wind handles absolutely the same way as a plane on a calm day. (For much, much more on this see the "downwind turn myth" thread in the Jets forum.)

Again, this is something full-scale pilots appreciate but modelers can easily get mixed up about. Full scale gliders use yaw strings (strings attached to the plane at the bottom of the center of the windshield). Whether the glider is flying upwind, downwind, or in a crosswind, the string goes straight up the center of the windshield. A string like that on a car or boat would behave very differently.