I have seen articles claiming that in a sideslip stall speed can actually be lower than in balanced flight, because of lift produced by the fuselage. There are also articles that claim that it's higher. Conceivably it could be both, depending on the aircraft type.
Does anybody know what the actual difference is, for any reasonably common types?
Ok. Lets not get carried away here.
When an aircraft stalls, there will be something showing on the ASI. This is the stall IAS in that aircraft, under those conditions. If the aircraft stalls under identical conditions, the stall IAS will be the same, so to suggest that there is no such thing as stall speed is unhelpful.
In a steady heading sideslip, in unaccelerated, level flight, there will be some wing blanking, some turbulence, some spanwise airflow. and some angling of the lift vector away from the vertical. For a given speed therfore, assuming for our purpose that the ASI has no position errror due to the sideslip, in order to maintain sufficient vertical lift component to support the weight, the AOA will have to be increased. This means that the aircaft will reach it's critical AOA at a higher speed.
In a sideslip, there will however, always be some element of lift generated by the fuselage, and there will be some vertical component of this lift. The question is, will this fuselage vertical lift component be sufficient to compensate for the vertical lift component lost. If it is, then there will be no increase in wing AOA to maintain the total vertical component, and the stall speed will remain the same. If it isn't, then the stall speed will be higher. If it is more than required just to compensate for the lost vertical component, then the stall speed will be lower.
In practice it will be difficult to evaluate the effect, without a special flight test pitot/static system, as the position errors in a sideslip can be huge, so I suggest that few pilots, if any, will be able to say which common types of aircraft fall into each category.
MJ
