Lateral stability: The lateral axis is an imaginary line running from wing tip to wing tip, movement about this axis causes the nose of the aircraft to raise or lower, and is caused by moving the elevators. Lateral stability is the tendency of an aircraft to resist roll.

Lateral Stability (Rolling) Stability about the aircraft’s longitudinal axis, which extends from the nose of the aircraft to its tail, is called lateral stability. Positive lateral stability helps to stabilize the lateral or “rolling effect” when one wing gets lower than the wing on the opposite side of the aircraft.

A: The angle at which the wing meets the oncoming air is called the angle of attack, and by changing this angle, you can affect how much lift a wing creates. If you tilt a wing upward, it creates more lift to a certain point. Tilting a wing up too much actually decreases lift because this can cause the plane to stall.

A high-wing airplane design, contributes to the lateral stability, whereas a low wing placement has a destabilizing effect in roll. However, this effect may be counteracted by including more dihedral to improve the overall lateral stability. Wing sweep will help promote lateral stability.

Putting It All Together. Dihedral is the upward angle of an aircraft’s wings, which increases lateral stability in a bank by causing the lower wing to fly at a higher angle of attack than the higher wing. What it really means is that you can fly more hands off, even in turbulence.

How does sweepback improve lateral stability? When an aircraft rolls to the left, the sweep angle on the left wing reduces, while the sweep angle on the right increases. This makes the left wing create more lift than the right wing, and the aircraft roll back wings level.

There are four main design factors which make an airplane stable laterally – dihedral, keel effect, sweepback, and weight distribution. It will be seen in later discussions that these factors also aid in producing yawing or directional stability.

Factors affecting directional stability around the blue axis:

• Vertical stabilizer.
• Center of Gravity (C of G)
• Propeller position puller is destabilizing.
• Propeller position pusher is stabilizing.
• Wing dihedral increases stability.
• Wing sweepback increases stability.
• Short fuselage decrease stability.

High-wing aircraft offer better visibility below the aircraft, especially for passengers in 4-seat or larger aircraft, as the wing doesn’t block it. Low-wing aircraft can offer better visibility above the aircraft, as the wing remains mostly out of the field of view.

elliptical wing

If the airplane is designed for low-speed flight, a thick airfoil is most efficient, whereas a thin airfoil is more efficient for high-speed flight. There are generally two kinds of airfoils: laminar flow and conventional. Laminar flow airfoils were originally developed to make an airplane fly faster.

High wing aircraft are aircraft whose wings are mounted above the fuselage. The wings on high wing aircraft tend to be relatively flat with little dihedral or anhedral. The Cessna 172 is one of the most common high wing general aviation planes.

The purpose of wing dihedral is to increase lateral stability. Angling an aircraft’s wings upward from the wing root to the wing tip is one way to add lateral stability. The wings forming a v-shape is called dihedral. Dihedral doesn’t affect longitudinal stability, nor does it increase coefficient of lift.

In aerodynamics, wing loading is the total mass of an aircraft divided by the area of its wing. Consequently, faster aircraft generally have higher wing loadings than slower aircraft. This increased wing loading also increases takeoff and landing distances. A higher wing loading also decreases maneuverability.

A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. Biplanes are distinguished from tandem wing arrangements, where the wings are placed forward and aft, instead of above and below. The term is also occasionally used in biology, to describe the wings of some flying animals.

The main reason for having multiple wings in the initial years of the aviation was the lack of availability of materials with sufficient strength. The main advantage of the biplane is that the wings could be shorter for a given lift.

Biplanes are much less common today than they were at the beginning of powered flight but are still widely used in the aerobatic training and airshow industry. Most biplanes are purpose built to be high performance type aircraft so typically they are not used much in the primary training of pilots.

It’s called a staggered wing and is done to reduce aerodynamic interference between wings in certain circumstances. A wing with positive (forward) stagger is most common because it improves both downward visibility and ease of cockpit access for open cockpit biplanes.

Machine guns were mounted on the top of the fuselage, directly in front of the pilot, but that position placed the gun directly behind the propeller. The gun had to be designed to fire through the propeller without hitting it, which was not an easy task.

triplane in American English (ˈtraiˌplein) an airplane with three supporting wings, one above another: a design used mainly in the early history of the airplane.

11,000 feet

When the plane gets too high, there is insufficient oxygen to fuel the engines. “The air is less dense at altitude, so the engine can suck in less and less air per second as it goes higher and at some point the engine can no longer develop sufficient power to climb.” …

Can an Airplane stand still in mid-air? Technically, it is possible for an airplane to hover for a few moments, but only in the rarest of circumstances. If weight and lift cancel each other out at the same exact time that thrust and drag cancel each other out, the plane would hover until one of these variables changed.

If an airplane flies in space, it won’t be able to suck in fresh air with which to supply its engines, resulting in loss of propulsion. The bottom line is that airplanes can’t fly in space because there is no air in space. Airplanes rely on air to produce both lift and propulsion.

Yes it can. A twin-engine aircraft can fly perfectly well on only one engine. In fact, it can even continue the take-off and then safely land with just one engine. Losing an engine in flight is not usually a particularly serious problem and the pilots are given extensive training to deal with such a situation.

45,100 ft