The most commonly available control is a wheel or other device to control elevator trim, so that the pilot does not have to maintain constant backward or forward pressure to hold a specific pitch attitude (other types of trim, for rudder and ailerons, are common on larger aircraft but may also appear on smaller ones). In addition to the primary flight controls for roll, pitch, and yaw, there are often secondary controls available to give the pilot finer control over flight or to ease the workload. Main articles: Trim tab, Flap (aircraft), Air brake (aircraft), Spoiler (aeronautics), Leading edge slats, and Variable-sweep wing Instead, the pilot just grabs the lifting surface by hand (using a rigid frame that hangs from its underside) and moves it. In ultralight aircraft and motorized hang gliders, for example, there is no mechanism at all. In some aircraft, the control surfaces are not manipulated with a linkage. Flight control has long been taught in such fashion for many decades, as popularized in ab initio instructional books such as the 1944 work Stick and Rudder. The basic pattern for modern flight controls was pioneered by French aviation figure Robert Esnault-Pelterie, with fellow French aviator Louis Blériot popularizing Esnault-Pelterie's control format initially on Louis' Blériot VIII monoplane in April 1908, and standardizing the format on the July 1909 Channel-crossing Blériot XI. Some are directly connected to the control surfaces using cables, others (fly-by-wire airplanes) have a computer in between which then controls the electrical actuators.īlériot VIII at Issy-les-Moulineaux, the first flightworthy aircraft design to have the initial form of modern flight controls for the pilotĮven when an aircraft uses variant flight control surfaces such as a V-tail ruddervator, flaperons, or elevons, because these various combined-purpose control surfaces control rotation about the same three axes in space, the aircraft's flight control system will still be designed so that the stick or yoke controls pitch and roll conventionally, as will the rudder pedals for yaw. Centre sticks also vary between aircraft. There are yokes where roll is controlled by rotating the yoke clockwise/counterclockwise (like steering a car) and pitch is controlled by moving the control column towards or away from the pilot, but in others the pitch is controlled by sliding the yoke into and out of the instrument panel (like most Cessnas, such as the 152 and 172), and in some the roll is controlled by sliding the whole yoke to the left and right (like the Cessna 162). The control yokes also vary greatly amongst aircraft.
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