What Actually Changes When You Add Ailerons

The most important thing to understand about the transition from a three-channel rudder/elevator/throttle (R/E/T) trainer to an aileron-equipped model has nothing to do with the ailerons themselves. It’s about dihedral — or rather, the lack of it.

Your R/E/T trainer had pronounced dihedral built into the wings: that upward V-angle gave the model strong self-righting tendencies. Bank it a little and it wants to come back to level on its own. The aileron wing is typically flat or nearly flat, which means that self-correcting behavior is largely gone. The model will stay where you put it — banked, wings level, or anywhere in between — and it won’t come back on its own.

This is not as dramatic a change as it sounds, provided you make the transition on a proper aileron trainer rather than jumping straight to a high-performance warbird. The sequence that makes sense: R/E/T trainer → aileron trainer → faster or more demanding aileron models. Your aileron-equipped trainer is exactly the right intermediate step.

From a control standpoint, the other big change is this: roll and yaw are now independent. On a rudder-only trainer, applying rudder banks the model and turns it at the same time — the dihedral handles the coupling. With ailerons, roll is managed with the ailerons and yaw is managed with the rudder. They work together, but they don’t automatically do so. That’s what the rest of this guide is about.

Adverse Yaw — Understanding the Problem Before You Fight It

To understand adverse yaw, you first need to understand two kinds of drag. Parasite drag is the resistance caused by moving solid objects through the air — landing gear, antennas, linkages, the fuselage itself. It increases with airspeed. Induced drag is different: it’s a byproduct of creating lift. Every time a wing generates lift, it also generates induced drag. More lift means more induced drag.

Ailerons work by changing the lift on each wing independently. When you initiate a left turn, the left aileron rises (reducing lift on the left wing, letting it drop) while the right aileron lowers (increasing lift on the right wing, raising it). But here’s the problem: that increased lift on the right wing also creates increased induced drag on the right side of the aircraft. More drag on the right means the nose yaws right — opposite the direction you’re trying to turn.

Most aileron trainers exhibit some degree of adverse yaw, and most pilots who learned on three-channel models find it surprising at first. The good news is that it’s predictable and quickly becomes second nature — especially after working through the Dutch roll exercise later in this guide.

The Coordinated Turn — All Four Controls, Every Time

A coordinated turn sounds simple: constant altitude, constant speed, constant rate of turn, with the tail following the nose. No sideslip, no skidding, no slipping. In practice, it involves all four controls working together, and getting there requires understanding what each one is doing.

The terminology for uncoordinated turns borrows from car driving. When the nose trails behind the rate of turn — hanging to the outside — it’s called a slip. When the nose tracks ahead of the rate of turn, it’s called a skid. Both increase drag and both are sloppy. A slipping turn is the most common problem for pilots new to ailerons, usually caused by insufficient pro-turn rudder.

The good news: a lot of skilled pilots never think explicitly about all this and their models fly fine. Many aileron trainers, including well-designed flat-wing models, don’t demand precise rudder coordination on every turn. But building the habit of coordinated flight pays dividends quickly — especially when the wind picks up or when you start flying more demanding models later on.

Dutch Rolls — Training Your Fingers

Dutch rolls are a deliberate practice maneuver designed to train your hands to coordinate roll and yaw simultaneously. The goal is to feel how much rudder is required to counter adverse yaw as you enter and exit banks, so that the input eventually becomes instinctive.

The Dutch roll is not a maneuver you’d perform intentionally on a regular flight. It’s a training tool — the RC equivalent of slow-speed handling drills for a student driver. Run through them on a calm day and your coordination during normal turns will improve noticeably within a single session.

The Forward Slip — Deliberate Uncoordinated Flight

Everything above has been about preventing slipping flight. Here we’re going to introduce it intentionally — because a slip, used correctly, is an extremely useful tool.

A forward slip is created by banking the aircraft in one direction while applying enough opposite rudder to cancel any turning tendency. The model continues flying in a straight line, but it’s moving sideways through the air — fuselage angled to the wind, generating significantly more drag than in coordinated flight. That extra drag increases the rate of descent without touching the throttle and without increasing airspeed. It’s how you steepen a descent when you’re high on approach without picking up speed.

The second application of slips — crosswind landings — builds directly on this technique. We’ll cover that in the next two sections.

Crosswind Takeoffs — Aileron Into the Wind

On a calm day, takeoff is a two-control exercise: rudder for directional control, elevator for pitch. Ailerons are barely involved. Add a crosswind and that changes — now all three primary controls are in play before the model leaves the ground.

Two forces work against you during a crosswind takeoff. First, the weathervane effect: the wind pushes on the fuselage and tries to yaw the nose into the wind, pulling you off the centerline. You counter this with opposite rudder — often a significant amount. Second, the upwind wing generates more lift than the downwind wing as the model accelerates, causing it to want to rise early. You hold it down with aileron into the wind.

The aileron input during the takeoff roll is something that surprises pilots the first time they need it. It feels counter-intuitive to hold aileron while rolling, but it’s exactly what keeps the upwind wing from prematurely lifting and rocking the model sideways at a low, vulnerable altitude.

Crosswind Landings — Crab, Slip, and Touchdown

Crosswind landings bring together everything covered in this guide. They require coordinated use of all four controls, a good slip technique, and enough spatial awareness to manage heading and drift simultaneously while descending toward a runway. That sounds like a lot — and the first few attempts will confirm it — but the technique is learnable and the payoff is significant.

Start by understanding the two-problem nature of a crosswind approach. If you simply point the model at the runway in a crosswind, it will drift sideways across the runway as it descends — the wind pushes the whole aircraft downwind regardless of where the nose is pointing. The solution to maintaining track is crabbing: turning the nose slightly into the wind so that your ground track remains aligned with the runway centerline. It works beautifully in the air.

The problem is that you cannot land in a crab. If the model touches down with the nose pointed away from the runway heading, the landing gear will scrub sideways across the pavement at whatever speed you were flying — and the model will not go where you want it to. The solution to landing heading is a slip: rudder to align the nose with the runway, aileron to prevent drift. The two controls do two different jobs simultaneously.

The recommended way to practice this is through go-arounds. Set up a normal crabbing approach and at 20–30 feet, transition into the slip: rudder for centerline, aileron bank for lateral position. Then execute a go-around before you reach the runway. Fly the traffic pattern again, crabbing throughout. Repeat the approach and go lower each time. When the approach feels stable and your positioning looks good, carry it through to touchdown.

The flare during a crosswind landing is where pilots most often lose it. As the model decelerates, the control surfaces lose authority and you’ll need to increase deflections — more rudder to hold the nose on centerline, more aileron to hold the bank, more elevator to flare. That need for increasing inputs continues through and after touchdown. Once all three wheels are on the ground, hold up elevator to help directional control during the rollout, and keep holding the aileron into the wind — the upwind wing will try to lift even as the model decelerates on the ground.