Surely if you are trying to return to the runway, you want to minimise the turn radius and therefore the number degrees of turn required to return. In a utopic world you would turn about the centre axis and point back at the reciprocal heading.
212man, I take your point, but the aim here is to use the crosswind to help in a different way. A jink
away from the crosswind will quickly displace the aircraft from the centreline such that a tight 180 (plus a bit) will line you up back on the reciprocal. If there is no crosswind and you fly a turn you will clearly be displaced by the diameter of the turn from the centreline. If you had a very strong crosswind you could dispense with the jink away and just turn towards it, this would again reduce most of this displacement. Wish I could draw it to make things clearer.
Islander2 wrote
For conventional fixed wing aircraft flown according to IAS, there is no difference between upwind and downwind turns in steady wind conditions.
Harriers and helicopters are different! A hover stationary with respect to the ground is the extreme example. Turning infinitely rapidly from a 30 kts headwind to a 30 kts tailwind produces a 60 kts loss of airspeed. Vice versa produces a 60 kts increase in airspeed. This is the effect JF got very accustomed to and very much needed to concern himself about with respect to the wind getting under the tail. BUT, the IAS is completely different in each case. Turning downwind, you're starting with an IAS of +30kts. Turning upwind, you're starting with an IAS of -30kts. Try this now without keeping the Harrier (or helicopter) stationary above a point on the ground, and arrange for it to have a +30 kts IAS in both cases, and the loss of airspeed will now be 60 kts whether turning downwind or upwind.
Think I follow that and agree; your IAS
will change when turning upwind/downwind.
There is no difference between turning down upwind and turning downwind at a given IAS. In both cases, a high rate of turn will result in loss of airspeed due to inertia and/or increased induced drag (the amounts of each depending on how the turn is achieved), and the loss will have exactly the same magnitude in both cases.
Not true. A slow aeroplane/helo does not need lots of 'g' to achieve high turn-rates, and therefore doesn't suffer from a big increase in induced drag.
In the Puma I could fly downwind with a low (+ve) IAS, but when I flew a balanced turn in to a strong headwind the IAS would rise dramatically before steadily reducing back to the steady state condition. You gain IAS turning in to the wind, lose it turning downwind - is that what you're saying?
