Talk:Flight controls

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New author. Please help me with formatting and wikification. Any appropriate graphics would be appreciated. Thanks! Skeetch 22:00, Nov 5, 2003 (UTC)

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- *Controls - Selkirk Collage Aviation Intranet: Notes on a wide range of aviation subjects.

This link - now removed by another user, is actually part of an intranet, not the internet, so it won't be visible to anyone outside the intranet. Peter Manchester 21:06, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Skeetch, I believe you are making a common miscoception about yaw, roll and pitch. The three axes are relative to the aircraft, not to the ground. Therefore the rudder always causes the aircraft to yaw, the elevators always cause a pitch change, and the ailerons always cause a roll change. Ailerons cause yaw as a secondary effect, and rudder causes roll as a secondary effect.

Turning is not the same as yawing. An aircraft in a coordinated bank turns but does not yaw.

In short: Effects of controls are:

• Elevators: primary pitch
• Rudder: primary yaw, secondary roll
• Aileron: primary roll, secondary yaw

Change of heading is not the same as yaw. For example, in a 90 degree bank they are not related at all.

This site, although it is about models, explains it well. http://www.bmfa.org/faq/flight_controls.htm also http://www.holdfastmac.com.au/techair3.html

It's also not generally true that neutralising the elevators returns the pitch to what it was. In general to recover from a nose-down attitude, for example, it is necessary to pull bak on the controls to raise the nose. It will not usually come up by itself.

DJ Clayworth 19:34, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Yes, the (hidden) assumption for all these effects is an intial attitude of straight and level flight at constant speed and altitude. The goal was to give the uninformed reader an introduction to the subject. An instructional treatise for student pilots needs to cover all situations and variables in detail. That was purposefully outside my scope for this article. Skeetch

A sensible approach, and one of the reasons I added the disclaimer a the start. I think we can get the basics across without having to confuse turning with yawing, which will only confuse people who actually fly. I've given this a go - what do you think? DJ Clayworth 14:18, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The section on 'Trimming Tail Plane' implies that all large aircraft use a fully movable tailplane for trimming. I'm pretty sure that ,for example, a 747 doesn't do this. Can anyone clarify? DJ Clayworth 14:02, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I have the same problem with this section. Having owned a Partenavia P68 (a light twin) I know it had a "trimming tail plane" as it is described in this article although I seem to remember it was called a stabilator. The photograph of the Airbus 319 appears to show a fixed horizontal stabilizer with an elevator. This site provides a description of these and even goes into some detail on V tails (which are briefly mentioned in the Wikipedia article) and canards (which don't get a mention in the article). --CloudSurfer 05:13, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] proposed merger

On august 4, 2005, user:Trevor MacInnis proposed that this article be merged with airplane flight mechanics.

I oppose as I feel that this is a significantly detailed topic to warrant its own article. ericg ✈ 05:22, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree with this merger, because airplane flight mechanics largely duplicates the matter here. This is the better article, and airplane flight mechanics should redirect here. Only a small amount of info should need to be copies across. However I would suggest a rename to airplane flight controls because those for e.g. balloons and helicopters are both very different and not covered here. DJ Clayworth 17:34, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that a merger with Flight dynamics would make more sense as it is currently a stub and most of its content is covered here already. Lucas42 14:29, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

a comment to your picture: if you press the right pedal in an airplane it will yaw to the right. In the picture the effect is inverted.

April 17, 2006 From an unregistered user to be identified as Commander_Shrek:

There are a couple nice things about having separate yet related articles: 1) The information is not clumped in one space thus simplifying information in each spot. 2) Users searching for pages will have a better shot at finding what they're looking for if there are related pages with different names.