Leading Turns With Rudder

On Jul 21, 9:53*am, sisu1a wrote:
Hi All,

An SSA 'Master' CFIG I know is perpetually hammering it into his
students that to initiate a turn in a glider, the FIRST thing you do
is feed in rudder. On his 1-5 list of making a turn in a glider, #1 is
rudder (as it's own separate input). While this may be aerodynamically
acceptable practice for a 2-33, it seems a recipie for disaster in
other ships to begin a turn by intentionally skidding. Since in a
pinch, one has a tendency to revert to instincts that were first
learned/practiced (right OR wrong), I see this as a setup for possible
future problems.
Since I have issues with this, I want to gather some other opinions
(particularly those of *other CFI's) to help present a case to
possibly get this corrected. He holds little value of MYopinion, so I
was hoping to get some 'name brand' opinions to help my case. And if I
am just putting to much into this, I would rather hear it from this
group.

-Paul

I was taught to lead with the rudder as well - and by a very good
CFIG. I believe the idea is: 1) to build up a little angular momentum
into the turn, 2) to use differential tip speeds to pick up the
outside wing with less adverse yaw and, 3) to overcome any tendency
for students to try to turn only with the stick. On many very long-
winged gliders, you really can't set the turn up properly with out
slewing the aircraft to use the differential tip speeds to help pick
the wing up. If you use too much aileron to initiate the turn the
adverse yaw makes a mess of things.

Obviously kicking the rudder hard at stall can have a bad effect and
most pilots I know believe that a steady state turn with a little slip
is optimal because the fuselage produces a little lift and since the
yaw string is ahead of the c.g. it will show a tiny amount of slip in
a coordinated turn to start with. But overall the safest advice is to
keep the yaw string centered and not do anything too aggressive with
the controls.

9B