RCU Forums - Slowing Down to Land

Quote:

Not that everyone else's advice was bad, quite the contrary, it's just that when you have a nose heavy plane, nothing is going to slow you down to an accepable landing speed because the plane's stall speed is higher, so even if you could slow it down, it would stall before it reached the speed you hoped for.

No, this is not completely correct. The balance of the airplane does not change the stall speed, as stall speed is controlled by the angle of attack of the wing. What happens with a nose heavy plane is you run out of elevator authority, so you can not slow the airplane any further because the amount of down force from the tail can no longer hold the nose of the airplane up (to increase the angle of attack). Thus the wing never reaches the angle at which it can stall and landing speeds remain high.

For those interested in slightly finer details, a nose heavy plane does slightly increase loading on the wing, since the tailplane has to generate slightly higher forces.