rcgldr said:
Beechcraft Bonaza ... low roll stability (slip recovery).
Danger said:
I always suspected that flying one would feel like riding a 3-legged horse or something...
I don't this is an issue of V-tail versus conventional tail. The articles mention an overspeed condition but did not explain the root cause of the overspeed condition. I'm not sure how close the cruise speed is to the never exceed speed, but normally there's some margin here. Random disturbances can put an aircraft into a slip condition, where it's banked but almost going straight. The aircraft starts "slipping" to the side decreasing altitude and gaining speed. If the wings have dihedral, then the side wind pushes the upwind wing upwards and the downwind wing downwards, which should level the wings and eventually stop the slip. However, if the sideways center of lift of the fuselage is above the center of mass of the aircraft, the fuselage generates a torque that opposes the correctional response from the dihedral in the main wing. There's also a yaw response to a slip, as the weathervane effect on the vertical component of the tail should yaw the plane into the direction of the slip, putting the plane into a mild dive, and as the plane picks up speed, the elevator trim should pitch the plane upwards to reduce speed (called pitch stability, the elevator is trimmed for a given speed in level flight). In the overspeed case, the typical self correction to a slip doesn't occur, and the aircraft picks up speed, part of which is a sideways component. It may be that the structural failures were related to a combination of forwards and sideways component of relative air flow.
I fly radio control gliders, both V-tail and conventional (cross) tail, and the V-tail models aren't any more difficult to control than the standard tail models. For both models and full scale aircraft the response to pilot input controls would be adjusted for a reasonable amount of sensitivity. For models, the amount of sensitivity is adjustable, since it's a fly by antenna situation, where the stick to throw reponse can be electronically adjusted in the transmitter, and mechanically adjusted on the model (the servo to control surface linkage).
The amount of self stability (slip and pitch) is setup depending on how the aircraft is to be used. Aerobatic models have close to zero stability, so that the model will tend to fly in a straight line with centered control inputs regardless if it's flying level, downwards or upwards (if flying fast enough) and so that a gusting sidewind doesn't produce a roll response (due to dihedral). Dihedral increases drag, so gliders tend to have less roll stabiliy than powered aircraft (except aerobatic models).
Getting back to the original question, there are a lot of radio control aircraft that only use rudder and elevator, and rely on dihedral in the wings for roll control. You can see a variety of designs in the the models. Some have wings that smoothly curve upwards toward the tips, while others have a 3 section wing with a flat main central wing and flat wing tip sections that are angled upwards, or a 4 section wing with a small dihedral in the central halves of the wing and greater dihedral at the tips (these are called "bent wing" models).
