Ron Wanttaja writes:

Ideally, the plane should drop like a shotgunned duck.

I've achieved some fairly high descent rates (faster than I could
normally achieve by other means), but not as fast as I've been led to
believe a slip could achieve. The plane keeps wanting to fly. I'll
grant that it's extremely difficult to coordinate the controls with a
twist-throttle rudder control (which is extremely sensitive).

The velocity vector
remains pointed in the same direction, but the aircraft is maneuvered so that it
is no longer pointed in the direction of the relative wind. Hence...lots more
drag, which means the descent angle can be steeper.

I presume that if I do it correctly, then, there should be no change
in the actual direction of motion of the aircraft, but only a change
in its orientation in the air, right? I haven't achieved that thus
far.

Because the airplane, while in a turning attitude, does not turn...it travels in
the same direction it was before the maneuver started.

So if I'm going straight in and I do a forward flip, I should be able
to look off to the left out the window and see the runway approaching
me (or to the right, although that might be harder from the left
seat).

Here's a couple of videos. This one is shot from an axle-mounted camera on my
airplane:

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/slip.wmv

The second one is video taken from the ground of me performing the same manu
ever on a different day:

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/slip2.wmv

Nicely done. I gather that you were actually looking sideways down at
the runway, and not in the direction the axle-mounted camera was
looking?

I've managed to get the aircraft to descend kind of that way, but it's
very hard to keep it stable and aligned with the runway. However, I
notice that even in your case the aircraft moves around a bit.

The Fly Baby model on MSFS can't, but I always figured that was
my fault. :-)

Or you had automatic rudder coordination turned on (it's the default).

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