Tailplane

A tailplane, also known as horizontal stabilizer (or horizontal stabiliser), is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyroplanes. However, not all fixed-wing aircraft have tailplanes, such as those configured with canards, flying-wing aircraft, where there is no tail, and v-tail aircraft where the fin/rudder and tail-plane are combined to form two diagonal surfaces in a V layout. The tailplane serves three purposes: equilibrium, stability and control.