[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 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