Hmm. If you follow some of the above advice you will increase your risk of losing models. How do you do a flick roll or spin? Elevator (for slow speed stall) and rudder. Steering with rudder while landing places you in a dangerous situation. You should not be going so slowly that you are in danger of stalling the downgoing aileron, if you are then you are also in the same danger of entering a spin by using rudder. A plane's direction is changed by banking it, the job of the fin and rudder is to keep the plane straight on into its own wind, not the wind that you on the ground perceive.

Aircraft that appear to be crabbing sideways across the ground are in fact pointing straight into their own wind and no rudder is involved. If rudder were required then full size pilots on long cross country flights would be tired out after 5 minutes! When changing your heading in a cross wind you still use aileron to turn the plane. Using rudder will simply yaw the plane which creates extra drag which clows you down even more at what could be a critically low speed already.

There are two ways to make a side-wind approach. One is to turn the aircraft in the normal manner slightly into wind so that it flies slightly sideways down the approach. This is exactly how you would fly that same path whether climbing, in level or descending flight. The wings are level, the slip ball is in the middle and the rudder is centred. Any correction to heading is made by a normal turn. Just as the wheels are about to touch down you use rudder to yaw the plane into the direction it is travelling to prevent the tyres being pulled sideways off the hub and also prevent the wheel direction from trying to take you off into the grass. The other method is a sideslip, it takes practice in full-size but much harder in a model. It is also more risky as the stalling speed is higher and therefore more likely to catch you unawares. The reduced vertical lift component and extra drag increase the rate of descent leading to a desire to pull back on the elevator (instead of the correct action of increasing power) which again adds to the risk of a stall. If the wind is from the model's right you bank it to the right. It therefore slips downhill to the right and compensates for the drift. However the fin tries to weathercock the model around to the right so you need some left rudder. Many planes will try to level themselves so you end up coming down the approach with right aileron and left rudder, and you must actually land like that, the into wind wheel will touch down first then you let the other wheel down. As I said, it takes practice to do it in full-size, it is much harder with a model. The first method is used by gliders because their long wing span and low height precludes them from landing with a bank into wind.

An earlier post mentioned that on landing you should use the elevator to control the speed, and power to control height change. This is absolutely correct, but it is not just true on approach. It is the fundamental rule at all times. I have flown full size from gliders through low power biplanes to jet fighters and the rule never varies from the moment the wheels leave the ground to the moment you touch down. A jet fighter's speed is just as sensitive to and controlled by elevator as is a glider.

Harry