Planes I've seen with dihedral seem to be overly effected by crosswinds. They get rocked downwind by any shift in breeze. This is strictly my observation. I know others will probably differ in their opinion. Because dihedral is often recommended to compensate for the vertical cg imbalance in a low wing design.  It seemed to me that Corsairs with their gullwing(?)  are also effected similarly.

What dihedral does is to give more angle of attack to the upwind wing when the airplane is in a sideslip. Hence if you maneuver downwind, a mid-wing airplane with dihedral would roll out (hinging, as stunt fliers say) on inside loops and in toward you on outside loops. Wing location on the fuselage has a similar effect.  A low wing location acts as negative dihedral, so the wing location and dihedral tend to cancel each other. Air flowing around a fuselage in a sideslip on a low-wing airplane flows down on the upwind wing and up on the downwind wing. This causes the upwind wing to have reduced angle of attack and the downwind wing to have increased angle of attack. Conversely, a high wing acts as positive dihedral. Hence, Cessnas have straight wings and Pipers have dihedral. High-wing airplanes like the C-141 and B-52 have negative dihedral to counter the effect of flow around the fuselage.

I found an Amazon book preview that explains it: http://books.google.com/books?id=AUWCXVepMKEC&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=rolling+moment+due+to+sideslip&source=bl&ots=sM7l7amIuP&sig=ikwkFTmTxDropmMR3fE1mDkDfvg&hl=en&ei=t3FTS6meNJPSsQOv8qH1Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q=rolling%20moment%20due%20to%20sideslip&f=false

Serendipitously, the leadouts on a low-wing airplane with dihedral come out at about the right location relative to the vertical CG.

(cut and pasted from SSW)

Great!
Thanks Howard ... Now another book I have to go buy!
If you think this is bad, contemplate what wing sweep does for the angle-of-attack dependent yaw into rolling moment couple.
Should we all be flying wings with straight 1/4 chord lines? We're back to the ARES!

Given a choice to add dihedral to get the leadouts in the right place and not having them at the vertical CG, I'd take the dihedral, but there is a good reason that most Stunters have straight wings and components juggled to get the CG correct.

take care,
Dean Pappas

I don't think JC Yates was actually thinking about vertical CG.  In his own words, he designed the Dragon (and later the Madman) to "look" like "real" planes!  Nothing more!  The Madman was actually a step backward in aerodynamics, but he favored the "look" of a tapered wing planform.

Floyd
(yes, I used to fly C/L with JC Yates)