Leading Turns With Rudder

On Jul 21, 12:53 pm, 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

Actually I learned to do the same thing, although from a commercial
pilot rather than my instructor.
Especially with long wing and/or slippery gliders (as opposed to the
2-33, which was rather
forgiving in this matter) the rudder tends to be underpowered, so you
can clean up
your coordination easier with adverse yaw. It seems backward, but it
works well if
you understand the principle involved. Personally I don't teach that
to a student until they've
got a good understanding of the controls, however.

One thing in particular that my instructor taught me is the importance
of really good coordination.
As a student, when I tried thermalling, I would find that my
instructor was "helping" me out
when the yawstring would suddenly "starch" itself exactly in the
center and the vario would
suddenly read about 200fpm better (he was really bad about that "my
plane, your plane"
business, and so I tend to be bad about it myself!).

-- Matt