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by SoftTalker
875 days ago
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The rudder is necessary for directional control specifically turns, and for flying straight in a crosswind. I've heard of a few cases where applying more/less power on the right/left engines can sort of crudely achieve the same thing, and you might get lucky and get on the groud without crashing, but loss of the rudder would be a serious emergency indeed. |
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Only if you add a secondary constraint of coordinated turns, which are important for passenger comfort and efficiency, but not directly a safety concern. (You still need directional stability, but that's provided by the fixed portion of the vertical tail, not the rudder.)
> and for flying straight in a crosswind.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of alignment between body angle and flight path. This constraint is totally absent in normal flight -- it only comes up during takeoff and landing, where it's useful to have the plane lined up with the runway to avoid side-loading the landing gear. In the case of a known rudder failure, you'd head to an alternate where there's not much crosswind, to avoid this issue; but you wouldn't expect many issues getting there.
The third case where the rudder is actually critical is when combined with other failures, especially asymmetric engine failures. There are parts of the flight envelope where a single engine failure combined with a rudder failure would not be expected to be survivable.