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Originally Posted by Nerys
hmm what airplane is that? I never heard of using spoilers to turn. you use then to burn altitude without increasing speed but to turn? I imagine it would be a sluggish method of turning but might be neat as a "backup" similar to using proportional thrust to turn etc..
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They're pretty common in some subfields of the av biz. The first three that pop to mind are the Mitsubishi MU-2 (twin engine corporate commuter) and of course (he said, blushing modestly) the Pterodactyl Ptiger and the Boeing PAVE Tiger. They're called spoilerons in that application and they're not sluggish at all, but they are draggier than ailerons. In fact that's their primary advantage; when banking, aelerons increase lift on the wing going up, which increases drag on that side, which makes the aircraft yaw away from the direction of the turn, but with spoilerons, drag increases on the wing going down, which yaws the aircraft into the turn. Thus they're particularly useful for low speed high dihedral recreational aircraft (Ptiger) and early UAVs that had to fly themselves (PAVE Tiger)--oh yes and for specialized aircraft flown by non-pilots (one more modest blush: the Kinetic Aerospace Switchblade in the 20th Bond film, Die Another Day). If everybody had spoilerons we wouldn't need rudder pedals any more--but we would need more Jet A because spoiler make drag. Spoilerons are not an ecomod.