On 2007-06-21 22:58:36 -0400, vincent norris said:

An aileron roll is actualy not dissimilar to a Barrel roll in flight
path.

You obviously didn't learn to do barrel rolls in the U.S.Navy.

vince norris

A lot of people mistakenly classify an aileron roll as a narrow offset
barrel roll thinking the natural arc the nose describes as it raises
before roll initiation and then lowers due to drag during the back side
of the roll resembles a barrel roll.
Seen from the ground, especially to a novice, an aileron roll,
especially an aileron roll performed in a low performance airplane with
a slow roll rate can indeed APPEAR to be a narrow offset barrel roll.
For the aileron roll, the nose is raised and set, then aileron applied
with just a touch of inside rudder to nullify the adverse yaw then
released. As the aircraft rolls with aileron, drag begins to pull the
nose down. The result of this, especially if no forward stick is
introduced to "trim out" the roll through inverted, is for the nose to
dish out the bottom of the roll which viewed from the ground can easily
be mistaken for a deliberate maneuver resembling a barrel roll.

Although it's true the nose does raise and lower during a normal
aileron roll,an aileron roll is still basically performed on the
longitudinal axis of the airplane using aileron or spoiler (can even
be aided by differential tails in some fighters) as the prime roll
control and doesn't meet the 3 dimensional rule through space that
defines the helical arc of a barrel roll.

Even this should not be mistaken for the 90 degree offset at inverted
barrel roll as taught by the Navy. The Navy version, and indeed
anyoneperforming a helical 90 degree heading offset through inverted is
doing the classical version of a barrel roll; the version most often
taught as a precision training maneuver.
So you are as I'm sure you already know, perfectly correct.
This explanation I hope might help others to understand this a bit better.
Dudley Henriques