Dihedral (aircraft) - How Dihedral Angle Creates Dihedral Effect and Stabilizes The Spiral Mode

How Dihedral Angle Creates Dihedral Effect and Stabilizes The Spiral Mode

The dihedral angle contributes to the total dihedral effect of the aircraft. In turn, the dihedral effect contributes to stability of the spiral mode. A stable spiral mode will cause the aircraft to eventually return to a nominally "wings level" bank angle when the angle of the wings is disturbed to become off-level.

If a disturbance causes an aircraft to roll away from its normal wings-level position as in Figure 1, the aircraft will begin to move somewhat sideways toward the lower wing. In Figure 2, the airplane's flight path has started to move toward its left while the nose of the airplane is still pointing in the original direction. This means that the oncoming air is arriving somewhat from the left of the nose. The airplane now has sideslip angle in addition to the bank angle. Figure 2 shows the airplane as it presents itself to the oncoming air.

Read more about this topic:  Dihedral (aircraft)

Famous quotes containing the words angle, creates, effect, spiral and/or mode:

    Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    The studio has become the crucible where human genius at the apogee of its development brings back to question not only that which is, but creates anew a fantastic and conventional nature which our weak minds, impotent to harmonize it with existing things, adopt by preference, because the miserable work is our own.
    Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)

    The law before us, my lords, seems to be the effect of that practice of which it is intended likewise to be the cause, and to be dictated by the liquor of which it so effectually promotes the use; for surely it never before was conceived by any man entrusted with the administration of public affairs, to raise taxes by the destruction of the people.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    What is art,
    But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
    When, graduating up in a spiral line
    Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
    It pushes toward the intense significance
    Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
    Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

    The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)