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Aviator90 Episode 3
[musical introduction]
Man: [0:31] Welcome back to yet another exciting episode of Aviator 90 from Angle of
Attack. The forces of flight you have learned about are very important to have in the back
of your mind when initially learning to fly. Eventually they will become second nature.
[0:46] Something that you will be doing a lot as a virtual pilot is controlling your aircraft
with the flight controls. You may be just starting out so developing a sense for how to
control the aircraft is very important. To be honest it's more difficult to control an aircraft
in flight simulator than it is in real life, but we'll do our best.
[1:06] We will now go through the different controls of the aircraft. There are controls we
will be using all of the time while flying by means of the yoke, or joystick, and connected
to the control surfaces by a system of cables. These controls are known as the primary
flight controls. Secondary flight controls will come later and those are meant for only
certain phases of flight.
[1:28] The primary flight controls are elevators, rudder, and ailerons. We'll go through
each one of these now in order.
[1:38] Elevators are located on the back of the aircraft as part of the empennage on the
horizontal stabilizer. The empennage is basically from right behind the wings and the
remainder of the back of the aircraft. Elevators control pitch of the aircraft. In other
words, you can change your angle of attack with these controls as you learned before. By
pulling back on the yoke, or joystick, this will deflect the elevators up like so, which
creates a bit of drag to push the tail down and the nose up.
[2:10] Conversely by pushing the nose forward, this deflects the elevators down. This
changes the shape of the horizontal stabilizer into a camber that produces much more lift,
pushing the tail up and the nose down. Remember elevators change our pitch. Pull back
we go up. Push forward we go down.
[2:32] The rudder is something that a lot of pilots actually ever use. The rudder is
essentially for stable and smooth flight. The rudder is located on the tail as part of the
empennage and part of the vertical stabilizer. The rudder controls yaw. If you were to
stick a pole right down between the pilots from top to bottom, this is the axis that yaw
controls. It doesn't make us turn, it doesn't make us climb up, but it does assist in keeping
the aircraft moving forward in a straight line.
[3:02] Without control of the rudder we'd be hostage to the aircraft pointing the nose
where the thrust takes it. Not always a good thing.
[3:11] Ailerons are located on the trailing edge of each wing usually toward the outer
edge. The ailerons control roll. Roll is what gets us to turn. Let's check this out in a right
turn and a left turn. When turning right, the right aileron goes up creating more drag

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while the left aileron goes down creating more lift. Therefore, the right wing dips and the
left wing lifts. We are now in a turn.
[3:43] Now when turning left, the left wing is the one creating drag. Therefore, the
aileron is deflected up and the right aileron is the one deflected down, creating more lift
and lifting the right wing. Usually when you're in a turn you can let go of the pressure on
the ailerons and the aircraft will generally maintain this turn or slowly return level. This
means you need only initiate the turn for the most part.
[4:08] Now on to the secondary flight controls. I consider secondary flight controls to be
set and forget controls. In other words they don't take constant input. The two secondary
flight controls that are pertinent to use are trim and flaps. We are going to dedicate a
whole episode to trim in the next episode, so for now we'll talk about the flaps only.
[4:33] A few minutes ago we talked about how when the elevators or ailerons are
deflected down they create more lift. Flaps do the exact same thing but they are
something you have to set and they just stay there once they're set. Flaps increase the area
of the wing creating more lift but they also change the camber of the wing.
[4:53] The cord-line of a wing is measured from tip to tail of a wing. When flaps are
introduced this greatly increases the angle of attack of the wing just by virtue of
extending out that surface. Flaps are not efficient for cruise flight and therefore are used
for takeoff and landing only.
[5:13] Later on when we're actually flying, all of these flight controls, both primary and
secondary, will make more sense. Now we are done with this episode, but join us for the
next one as we look into why trim is so important for an aircraft and why we need to
dedicate an entire episode to it.
[5:31] Until then, throttle on.
Transcription by CastingWords