The captions use a bit of a broken and terse English to limit character usage. Hopefully still educative.
Forward Slip is a real life aviation technique to rapidly lose speed and altitude, often used in engine-out situations where a go-around to slowly get down to altitude in a pattern is not viable.
It’s a very simple technique: You put hard left or right rudder and yank the stick the opposite direction just enough to level out. You can manage left/right stick to adjust your ground track (direction your plane is travelling).
Done right, your plane will look very stupid as it flies sideways through the air. This is desirable for us, as a plane flying sideways has a massive surface area that creates very high wake drag.
This video demonstrates a forward slip landing in an F4U-4 Corsair, showcasing its power to bring us down from over 2K altitude while maintaining dogfight viable speeds until final approach. At any point until the last few hundred meters we could’ve released our rudder, applied WEP and dodged incoming attackers.
While demonstration was done with the F4U-4 corsair, forward slips are possible with most aircraft. In real life, twin engine jet aircraft might experience issues due to airflow blockage and whatnot. I do not own a twin-engine jet craft in warthunder to confirm if such an issue exists.
However, for jet aircraft other techniques exist that are just as viable for high-speed landings - the Overhead break. Although possible with propeller planes, the lack of speed brakes and usually superior energy retention and low speed lift makes them feel janky for me.
Nota bene:
This requires either rudder pedals or some other fine control over your rudders.
Using Mouse & Keyboard, I use “Relative” controls and 3% step with 1.5 non-linearity.
If you have yaw/roll mixing in your control inputs, this won’t be possible due to it overriding your rudder inputs.
Tutorial was inspired by reading about people getting teamkilled by friendlies as they’re landing because people keep using their guns to slow down.
Using a forward slip, as demonstrated, you can drop down from 2.5 km altitude and maintain ~500 km/h until the last second, allowing for very fast landings without need to shoot your guns to brake and slow down. No accidental teamkills, goofy looking plane - what’s not to love?
