Math in… Flying a Plane
While you might go down stairs or up hills, changing the direction you’re walking basically comes down to rotating left or right by some angle and then heading off in that new direction.
Flying a plane is much more three-dimensional. You can still pivot left or right, but a big part of flight is ascending and descending!
While you might associate rolling with stunt planes, the angle that a plane tilts sideways is also an important thing for all pilots to control!
So, while there is only one axis of rotation you tend to think about when walking or driving, pilots keep track of three axes of rotation when flying. We call rotation about these axes yaw, pitch, and roll.
Using a combination of yawing, pitching, and rolling, a pilot can have a plane’s nose point in any chosen direction with its wings tilted at any desired angle.
Just like a driver controls the angle of the wheels on a car to change the car’s direction, a pilot uses hinged flight control surfaces to make a plane yaw, pitch, and roll.
Have you ever had an experience flying in a small plane or a stunt plane? What was it like to feel the effects of pitch and roll?
