Originally Posted by
speedracerntrixie
All the model P-51's that I have flown have had very bad control cross couple. When rudder is applied the airplane has wanted to roll the same direction and pitch downward. Is the full scale P-51 the same?
Hard to answer as I don't generally apply rudder except to keep the slip ball centred. Exceptions in the P-51 were rudder with the roll in the last 1/3rd to help keep the nose up, small amount of bottom rudder in knife edge after assymetric stall to get the nose down, and tiny amount of rudder only to turn at very slow speed. I don't recall it having any pronounced rolling effect beyond what you would normally expect and I am sure it had no pitching effect, but I must emphasise i don't use lots of rudder to push the plane way out of balance unless doing flicks or spins which I didn't do in the P-51. If you work the rudder to keep the slip ball centred at the stall, it stalls very gently straight ahead, it only drops a wing if you let the slip ball go off centre, which is true for every type that I have stalled. High speed stalls in turns tended to make the P-51 sit upright though on one occasion it rolled deeper into the turn but I was looking ahead where I was going in the turn so I may have let the slip ball move off centre in the turn.