Originally Posted by FlyWheel
What are "slips"? Besides women's lingere, I mean.
It is when you peel off altitude and to some degree speed to make a short approach to landing by holding some opposite rudder to aileron....ie left rudder with some right aileron. It makes the airplane crab or come in turned in relation to the direction of travel. It creates a high drag situation while increasing sink rate.
normally if you come in steep on short final the plane will have too much speed and especially a cub like plane will then balloon and try to keep floating along defeating the short approach. At the last minute you have to straighten the plane out to avoid smoking the tires or going into a nasty ground loop.
Here is a gorgeous example in an L-4 Cub doing a really short approach using the "forward slip":
Dave