Avionics: The electronic instrumentation and control equipment used in airplanes.

Avionics is a portmanteau which literally means aviation electronics. In essence it comprises all electronic systems designed for use on an aircraft. At a basic level this comprises communications, navigation and the display and management of multiple systems. It also comprises the literally hundreds of systems that are fitted to aircraft to meet individual roles.

Introduction to how airplanes work: Aerodynamic Forces

Before we dive into how wings keep airplanes up in the air, it's important that we take a look at four basic aerodynamic forces: lift, weight, thrust and drag.

Straight and Level Flight

In order for an airplane to fly straight and level, the following relationships must be true: Thrust = Drag Lift = Weight If, for any reason, the amount of drag becomes larger than the amount of thrust, the plane will slow down. If the thrust is increased so that it is greater than the drag, the plane will speed up. Similarly, if the amount of lift drops below the weight of the airplane, the plane will descend. By increasing the lift, the pilot can make the airplane climb. 1) Thrust Thrust is an aerodynamic force that must be created by an airplane in order to overcome the drag (notice that thrust and drag act in opposite directions in the figure above). Airplanes create thrust using propellers, jet engines or rockets. In the figure above, the thrust is being created with a propeller, which acts like a very powerful version of a household fan, pulling air past the blades. 2) Drag

Drag is an aerodynamic force that resists the motion of an object moving through a fluid (air and water are both fluids). If you stick your hand out of a car window while moving, you will experience a very simple demonstration of this effect. The amount of drag that your hand creates depends on a few factors, such as the size of your hand, the speed of the car and the density of the air. If you were to slow down, you would notice that the drag on your hand would decrease. We see another example of drag reduction when we watch downhill skiers in the Olympics. You'll notice that, whenever they get the chance, they will squeeze down into a tight crouch. By making themselves "smaller," they decrease the drag they create, which allows them to move faster down the hill. If you've ever wondered why, after takeoff, a passenger jet always retracts its landing gear (wheels) into the body of the airplane; the answer (as you may have already guessed) is to reduce drag. Just like the downhill skier, the pilot wants to make the aircraft as small as possible to reduce drag. The amount of drag produced by the landing gear of a jet is so great that, at cruising speeds, the gear would be ripped right off of the plane. 3) Weight This one is the easiest. Every object on earth has weight (including air). A 747 can weigh up to 870,000 pounds (that's 435 tons!) and still manage to get off the runway. 4) Lift Lift is the aerodynamic force that holds an airplane in the air, and is probably the trickiest of the four aerodynamic forces to explain without using a lot of math. On airplanes, most of the lift required to keep the plane aloft is created by the wings (although some is created by other parts of the structure).

Wing: (how wings keep airplanes up in the air)

A wing is a device for generating lift. A common use of wings is in flight, using forward motion to create vertical lift. Wing shape is usually an airfoil An airfoil (in American English, or aerofoil in British English) is the shape of a wing or blade (of a propeller, rotor or turbine) or sail as seen in cross-section. An airfoil shaped body moved through a fluid produces a force perpendicular to the fluid called lift.

Terms used to describe aircraft wings

Flaps partially deployed

Full flaps

Full flaps, with spoilers deployed.

Flaps are hinged surfaces on the trailing or leading edge of the wings of a fixed-wing aircraft which, when deployed, change the coefficient of lift and drag of a wing. Flaps are usually fully extended while landing to allow the aircraft to fly more slowly (by increasing the lift generated by the wings at slow speeds) and to steepen the approach to the landing site. In aeronautics a spoiler (sometimes called a lift dumper) is a device intended to reduce lift in an aircraft. Spoilers are plates on the top surface of a wing which can be extended upward into the smooth airflow and spoiling it. By doing so, the spoiler creates a carefully controlled stall over the portion of the wing behind it, dramatically reducing lift.

Bernoulli's Principle states that in an ideal fluid (low speed air is a good approximation),
with no work being performed on the fluid, an increase in velocity occurs simultaneously with decrease in pressure or a change in the fluid's gravitational potential energy. The force on the wing can also be examined in terms of the pressure differences above and below the wing, which can be related to velocity changes by Bernoulli's principle. The total force (Lift + Drag) is the integral of pressure over the contour of the wing.

Where:

L is the Lift, D is the Drag, is the frontier of the domain, p is the value of the pressure, n is the normal to the profile.

Since it is a two-dimensional vector equation, and since lift is perpendicular to drag, this equation suffices to predict both lift and drag. The drag component is Lift-induced drag rather than Form drag. This equation is always exactly true, by the definition of force and pressure.

Pressure Variations Caused by Turning a Moving Fluid

Lift is a force on a wing (or any other solid object) immersed in a moving fluid, and it acts perpendicular to the flow of the fluid. (Drag is the same thing, but acts parallel to the direction of the fluid flow). The net force is created by pressure differences brought about by variations in speed of the air at all points around the wing. These velocity variations are caused by the disruption and turning of the air flowing past the wing. The measured pressure distribution on a typical wing looks like the following diagram:

A. Air approaching the top surface of the wing is compressed into the air above it as it moves upward. Then, as the top surface curves downward and away from the airstream, a low-pressure area is developed and the air above is pulled downward toward the back of the wing. B. Air approaching the bottom surface of the wing is slowed, compressed and redirected in a downward path. As the air nears the rear of the wing, its speed and pressure gradually match that of the air coming over the top. The overall pressure effects encountered on the bottom of the wing are generally less pronounced than those on the top of the wing. C. Lift component D. Net force E. Drag component When you sum up all the pressures acting on the wing (all the way around), you end up with a net force on the wing. A portion of this lift goes into lifting the wing (lift

component), and the rest goes into slowing the wing down (drag component). As the amount of airflow turned by a given wing is increased, the speed and pressure differences between the top and bottom surfaces become more pronounced, and this increases the lift. There are many ways to increase the lift of a wing, such as increasing the angle of attack or increasing the speed of the airflow.

Flight dynamics
The three critical flight dynamics parameters are rotations in three dimensions around the vehicle's coordinate system origin, the center of mass. These angles are pitch, roll and yaw:

Pitch is rotation around the lateral or transverse axisan axis running from the pilot's left to right in piloted aircraft, and parallel to the wings of a winged aircraft; thus the nose pitches up and the tail down, or vice-versa. Roll is rotation around the longitudinal axisan axis drawn through the body of the vehicle from tail to nose in the normal direction of flight, or the direction the pilot faces. o The roll angle is also known as bank angle on a fixed wing aircraft, which "banks" to change the horizontal direction of flight.

Yaw is rotation about the vertical axisan axis drawn from top to bottom and perpendicular to the other two axes.

Rudder: (Yaw)
On an aircraft, the rudder is called a "control surface" along with the rudder-like elevator (attached to horizontal tail structure) and ailerons (attached to the wings) that control pitch and roll. The rudder is usually attached to the fin (or vertical stabilizer) which allows the pilot to control yaw in the horizontal axis, i.e. change the horizontal direction in which the nose is pointing. The rudder's direction is manipulated with the movement of foot pedals by the pilot

Elevator: (Pitch)

Elevators are control surfaces, usually at the rear of an aircraft, which control the aircraft's orientation by changing the pitch of the aircraft, and so also the angle of attack of the wing. An increased angle of attack will cause a greater lift to be produced by the profile of the wing, and (if no power is added or available), a slowing of the aircraft.

Aileron: (Roll)

Ailerons are hinged control surfaces attached to the trailing edge of the wing of a fixed-wing
aircraft. They are used to control the aircraft in roll. The two ailerons are interconnected so that one goes down when the other goes up: the down going aileron increases the lift on its wing while the up going aileron reduces the lift on the other wing, producing a rolling moment about the aircraft's longitudinal axis. The word aileron is French for "little wing."

Flight Leg
Flight leg is a segment of a flight plan, i.e. flight path between two waypoints. Taxiing refers to the movement of an aircraft on the ground, under its own power. An airplane uses taxiways to taxi from one place on an airport to another, for example: when moving from a terminal to the runway or along the runway during take-off. An airplane uses taxiways to taxi from one place on an airport to another, for example: when moving from a terminal to the runway or along the runway during take-off. Takeoff is the phase of flight in which an aircraft goes through a transition from moving along the ground (taxiing) to flying in the air, usually on a runway. Climb is the part of a flight of an aircraft, after take off, consisting of getting the aircraft to the desired flight level altitude. More generally, the term 'climb' means increasing the altitude.

A pilot generally induces a plane to climb by setting the appropriate power level and using elevators to adjust the pitch of the plane for the appropriate speed. This technique is far more effective than trying to achieve a particular climb rate directly.
Cruise is the level portion of aircraft travel where flight is most fuel efficient. It occurs between ascent and descent phases and is usually the majority of a journey. Technically, cruising consists of heading (direction of flight) changes only at a constant airspeed and altitude. It ends as the aircraft approaches the destination where the descent phase of flight commences in preparation for landing. A descent during air travel is any portion where an aircraft decreases altitude, and is the opposite of an ascent or climb. Descents are an essential component of an approach to landing. Landing is the last part of a flight, where a flying aircraft returns to the ground. Landing is generally accomplished by gradually tapering down airspeed and lift. The first phase is the flare, where the rate of descent will be reduced by adopting a nose-up attitude. After slowing down, the plane changes pitch into the landing attitude shortly before touching down. The attitude is held until the primary wheels touch the ground and the controls are either held until all wheels touch the ground or gently adjusted (often in the case of tail-draggers) to ensure the nose-wheel or tail-wheel lightly touches the runway.