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Learning Across Disciplines

High Speed Flight

This section gives a very simple treatment of three highly specialized disciplines. First, we see the notion of Static Stability. Observing some simple rules ensures that an aircraft is stable to small disturbances, and can be trimmed to fly along at a given flight condition. This is the essential knowledge to design the mass distribution of the aircraft, for instance, where should the fuel tanks be placed, and how should the fuel consumption be managed so that the center of gravity of the aircraft does not shift much?

The vast discipline of Flight Control is only glimpsed here, looking at how control surfaces are used to generate desired forces that change the attitude of an aircraft. This is enough to give us an idea of how large these surfaces should be, and how rapidly the aircraft can be made to change directions. This is the gateway to explore the flight dynamics of aircraft and then on into the field of flight control, where the time-dependent differential equations of motion are solved.

The aerodynamics that we learned before, is good for low speed flight. All aircraft have to go through low speed flight at takeoff and landing, so that section is relevant. But what happens when aircraft travel very fast, at speeds comparable to, or greater than, the speed of sound? This strange and beautiful field is glimpsed here, with Mach cones, shocks, expansions, and the tough problems of transonic flight. We then briefly extend our new knowledge to glimpse the field of hypersonics, and of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere from Space.

Please download the pdf formatted notes here.