I think that there is a little ambiguity here about the definition of wing loading. I had always understood this to be weight/wing area, and what is being discussed here is load factor i.e. lift/weight and what a cockpit mounted normal accelerometer will read.
The way to think about this is to consider the 4 forces on an aircraft (lift, weight, drag and thrust) and then resolve weight (and thrust although that is not relevant here) with respect to lift and drag vectors. In a level turn, load factor = 1/cosine bank angle (Tarq57, almost right! Sin 60 = Cos30 = 0.8661, sin30 = 0.5). In a wings level climb or descent, load factor = 1/cosine flightpath angle. For example, in a 45 deg climb or descent the aircraft will have a load factor of 0.7g. If we now consider an aircraft in a 45 deg bank turn and in a simultaneous 45 deg descent, load factor = 1/cos45 x 1/cos45 = 0.5g.
The trick with this is always to resolve the forces with respect to lift and drag and not with respect to the weight vector because that really confuses me!
Last edited by LOMCEVAK; 7th Feb 2016 at 16:23.