Maggie's Farm

But I don't like landing in a crab, but I guess the slip (I'll describe an aviation "slip" in a minute) is too scary looking for heavys. (It might even bee that the stresses of a slip landing are too much--AE I am not.

The pictures sho a crab--wings level, nose pointed into the wind.

In a light aircraft the wheels don't "dolly" so you have to kick the crab out (bring the nose around in front) just as you touch down.

In a slip you drop the up-wind wing (as if turning into the wind) then use the rudder to keep the nose pointed the way you are going. In normal flight configurations this is called a slip (other words that will come up are "crossed controls", and "unco-ordinated" which are Bad Things).
(Controls crossed the other way is a skid. The crab is neither.)

I have not been in the front office of an airplane in a lot of years, I hope I have not remembered the terms backward.

It occurs to me that the probable reason for not using side-slips on crosswind approaches is this:

In the crab "down" feels pretty much where the revenue pax expect it to be, some where under their butts.

In the side slip, "down" feels like it is out the side of the aircraft, which makes people who don't understand it all really nervous--and since they are not outside, they don't know that they are flying sideways.

Those videos are pretty awesome, by the way.

Definitely would.

But that is where my engineering fails because while it seems like the whole weight would be on the upwind gear, it also seems like the downwind wing would still be flying and carrying its share of the load.

And all of that seems like that would be less than the side-load on the gear, but maybe the computer does a perfect job or presetting the gear for the direction of travel.

Turns out that there is more that I don't know than there is that I do.