On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 9:12:14 AM UTC-4, Tango Whisky wrote:
Kenn,

still puzzled about that. If you start deflecting the rudder to the right, the relativ wind for the fin is coming from the right, and the fin produces lift to the left.
If you end up this maneuvre with the fin stalled from relativ wind to the left, at some point the lift vector would have to change from the left to zero and than to the right before braking down upon stall. That should be something quizzy to feel - I'm doing banked slips on a regular basis with progressive slip angles (up to full controls deflections where I would guess the slipangle is something like 30 deg) and I have never experienced the "inversion".
Having said that, and imaging that the rudder is actually stalled, I strongly doubt that adverse yaw alone would stabilize the slip (plus, the stalled rudder still produces considerable drag which would pull the nose to the left). What does help stabilizing the slip is the additional drag of the forward fuselage section due to the slip angle - especially in the case of two-seaters.

That's a great point about the forward fuselage section. It certainly is a lot draggier than the fine aft fuselage,. and must contribute some to the stabilized slip.

It might be that you can only get to this stabilized state by first applying full rudder and then bank. If you bank first and then apply rudder, I wouldn't expect the scenario I described above to be possible. In a progressive slip, once the rudder stalls you'd have a very abrupt step change. This would be a valuable test to perform in the air. Maybe if the next time I'm up in the Grob I can find some easy lift I can experiment with various control techniques.

BTW, it's possible that the vertical stabilizer isn't stalled but that the rudder is still experiencing a locking force to leeward. The airflow normal to the vert. stabilizer will want to deflect the rudder, and the flow parallel to it will want to realign the rudder. It could be that in a rudder lock situation the empennage is not stalled, but that something about the flow makes it so that the rudder deflection force overcomes the realignment force.