Spitfire Question

[David603]

Originally Posted by MorgothNL

There we go ... thnx for clearing it up david
Any idea as to why one wing of the F4U would stall before the other?

At a guess, the torque from the prop is affecting one wing more than the other. Say the prop is rotating clockwise from the pilots point of view, as on the Corsair, this will mean the plane will be trying to roll left. This will have the effect of increasing the amount of lift the left wing has to provide, so if you are on the point of stalling it will be the left wing that drops first, and vice versa if the prop rotates the other way.

This fits with the Corsair's tendency to stall and drop its left wing if power was suddenly increased when flying slowly, but I'm not sure why it also has a reputation for stalling and dropping the right wing if power was kept constant and the plane was allowed to slow down to stall speeds. I took a Corsair up in Il2 1946 to test this, and tried flying at a safe altitude with the flaps and gear down at low speed, and then seeing which wing dropped first, and it was always the left wing, regardless of whether I throttled up or let the plane stall on its own because of a lack of airspeed.

I really should look into this more, because I was just flying a combat mission with a Spitfire XIV and I pranged it on landing because I was coming in below the glide path, so I throttled up and the right wing dropped and smacked me into the ground. Plane didn't blow up, because I only dropped about 20ft, but it was a total write-off.