Air Safety

Constants and Trim

Two Characters With the Right Approach

In the previous issue, we considered the elements in a safe landing.

Now let’s look a little more closely at the control of the aircraft.

An aircraft designer goes to great pains to make his aircraft stable. What is stable? There are several kinds of stability and in different planes. The one that interests us most on the final approach is longitudinal static stability – more simply that is the aircraft’s tendency to maintain or return to its trimmed angle of attack. Yes, the aircraft ia designed to maintain an angle of attack. (There is a further, longer-term effect with changing airspeed which we can disregard for the moment. )

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