ORIGINAL: cfircav8r
Yes that is called ''wind shear'' or to the layperson ''gusting,'' and if you look back we each said aside from gusts, wind shear, and turbulence (thermal activity.) Beleave me when I say I truely understand this. I have been teaching professional pilots for close to 15 years. I, as well as Top Gunn, have a firm understanding of the physics of flight, and as Top Gunn has so elequently stated inertia plays into it no matter what direction you are turning in relation to the moving mass of air you are flying in. As far as the change in velocity of the ''wind'' it will happen at any stage of flight and have the same effect. I have flown low (500' is low for a full scale) and near stall while flying for the DNR deer spotting and the only thing I had to change while turning was the timing of my turn to account for the wind. I never needed to add any throttle for the turns, and I didn't even loose 2kts of airspeed through any turn reguardless of wind direction because I used a shallow bank, which is all that is needed when flying that slow.
I presume that while doing this, you weren't standing on the ground trying to stay lined up with a runway or RC field, or you might have had to use more than a shallow bank. Also, you would have to be in about 60kts of wind to experience the same result as an RC plane in a 12knt wind, so a 2knt loss is a very significant loss if you were only flying in 5knt winds. For full scale, I do agree with your point in theory, but still apples to oranges in the most relevant sense of piloting a plane while standing on the ground.
