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Old June 20th 05, 09:13 AM
Peter Duniho
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"Tony" wrote in message
oups.com...
Not quite true. Start a coordinated turn, decending at the same time
and you can keep the bathroom scale you're sitting on reading your
weight.


Only if that descent involves a vertical acceleration. That is, it's not a
constant rate descent.

A constant rate descent would require 1G of *vertical* lift, which means
greater than 1G of actual lift from the wing (where I blatantly misuse "1G"
as a way of describing the amount of lift equal to the weight of the
airplane ). Using your 45 degree bank angle example that comes to about
1.41G.

Alternatively, maintaining 1G of lift would mean that the descent rate would
be increasing throughout the turn. Depending on the bank angle, this could
turn into a pretty dramatic descent rate in short order.

Pete