Fear of Landing

APRIL 11, 2025

Instead, they had to drag the aircraft tail first off of the grass and back to the hangers. The nose gear of the F27 was so damaged that even when they restarted the engines, it was not possible to taxi forward or even to tow it by the nose back onto the runway. How can we explain such an elementary mistake?

Cockpit

Pilot Institute

FEBRUARY 20, 2025

The problem is that the aileron can only be deflected to a point after which the drag becomes significant. Most of the ailerons mass lies behind the hinge, making it tail-heavy. Tail-heavy ailerons droop downwards when they arent being pulled by the control system. potentially reverting the aileron back into a tail-heavy state.

Aileron

Pilot's Life Blog

JANUARY 12, 2025

Understanding the Basics of Flight Principles of Flight: Lift, Weight, Thrust, and Drag Flying a plane for the first time requires a basic understanding of the forces that make flight possible. Thrust, produced by the engines, moves the plane forward, while drag, or air resistance, slows it down.

Aileron

Vintage Aviation News

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

The airship initially recovered, dumping ballast and stabilizing at 700 feet above the sea and returning to its cruising altitude of 1,600 feet, but the ship was sent into another plunge, falling a rate of 14 feet per second tail-down.

Lift

Pilot Institute

APRIL 12, 2025

The reaction in the form of increased thrust allows the aircraft to overcome drag and accelerate or climb. Helicopters use a small rotor mounted on the tail that produces sideways thrust to counter the main rotors torque reaction. The tail rotor pushes air to one side ( action ), and the tail moves the other way ( reaction ).

Torque

Fear of Landing

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

A significant amount of mud had accumulated within all landing gear bays, underneath the wings including flap surfaces, and over the fuselage towards the tail. They dragged sideways across the runway surface, causing that single track. The report doesn’t mention this but it is clear that the aircraft was well and truly stuck.

Crosswind

Pilot Institute

FEBRUARY 15, 2025

A massive explosion followed, and the tail section skidded backward. Keep wings level to prevent unnecessary drag or instability. During final descent, it flew into a microburst, causing a rapid loss of altitude. The aircraft struck a highway, hitting a car before crashing into a water tank. 134 people died, along with the cars driver.

Wind Shear

WayMan

MAY 25, 2025

These include: Fuselage Wings Cockpit Engine Propeller (in some aircraft) Tail Assembly (Empennage) Landing Gear Understanding how these parts interact is essential to grasping the basics of aerodynamicsand its one of the first steps in becoming a safe and informed pilot. Its also the anchor point to which the wings and tail are attached.

Lift

Aerotime

NOVEMBER 15, 2024

Winglets and Sharklets Both Airbus and Boeing operate aircraft with wingtip devices that are designed to increase aircraft efficiency by removing drag. The devices would prove to “reduce wingtip drag” and increase “fuel efficiency by 6-7%” but would need be positioned uniquely for each aircraft type.

Lift

Plane and Pilot

APRIL 14, 2025

Just enough tail to do the job. Once retired, it earned a spot in the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and today headlines the Nation of Speed exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. However, the Nemesis story did not end here. It was, as they say, all et up with motor.

Airfoil

Vintage Aviation News

FEBRUARY 11, 2025

Around this time, the USAAF was also developing its first jet fighters, but knew that all-jet aircraft at this time were short-ranged and burned fuel quicker than propeller-driven aircraft, and so the optimal design was to feature a propeller-driven engine in the front for long range performance and a jet engine in the tail for high speed in combat.

Thrust

Aerotime

MARCH 27, 2025

Following D-Day, as the war began to tail off, Yeager returned to fly combat missions, as Eisenhower yielded to Yaeger’s demands. These helped to minimize drag and ensure aerodynamic efficiency at high speeds. Nevertheless, Yeager remonstrated this point with Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself.

Pilot

Flying Magazine

JULY 22, 2025

The deicing boots seem to mate so smoothly with the wings and tail that the only way to tell where that happens is that they are different colors. When that big Hartzell prop flattens out, it produces a lot of drag that lets one nicely fine-tune speed and rate of descent. Once we canceled IFR, we spent some time hand-flying the AX.

Rudder

Plane and Pilot

JULY 22, 2025

Stick neutral, bring the throttle up smoothly, watch the edge of the runway with your peripheral vision, and as that tail comes up, you’ll get a little more visibility. Before I knew it, the tail was ready to come up, so I pushed the stick forward. Before I knew it, the tail was ready to come up, so I pushed the stick forward.

Runway

Vintage Aviation News

DECEMBER 27, 2024

Despite some engine troubles, the FJ-3 gained greater acceptance with the fleet than the FJ-2 and was later modified to carry the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile as the FJ-3M and in 1956, the Navy retrofitted all its FJ-3s with refueling probes under the left wing to couple to a drogue dragged behind an aerial refueling tanker.

Jet

Plane and Pilot

FEBRUARY 20, 2025

Its connected, along with a safety weak link, to the tail of the airplane. With skill (and some luck) the hook catches, the plane roars up to not drag the fabric along the ground, and the whole assembly is hoisted into the air. Dropping the banner removed its drag, but only pitching down would have escaped the stall.

Drag

Vintage Aviation News

JUNE 18, 2025

Palmer and his team created wooden models of various airfoils, engine cowlings, and tail surfaces in a rented garage before bringing them to Caltech in Pasadena, where they utilized the school’s wind tunnel to test the designs until they were satisfied with the results. Army Air Corps’ newest and fastest fighter.

Cockpit

Vintage Aviation News

JANUARY 14, 2025

However, since Convair was also developing the XF-92 delta wing prototype for a future Air Force interceptor, the design team at Convair, led by Ernest Stout, proposed a new delta wing aircraft with retractable hydro-skis for takeoffs and landings, a watertight hull, and a single delta tail.

Cockpit

Fear of Landing

JULY 4, 2025

The pilot dragged the helicopter onto a helipad and removed the ground wheels, storing them safely before boarding the helicopter. The tail boom was intact, so the tail rotor did not fail. As the pilot had used authorised security codes, there was no security breach to attract their attention.

Cockpit

Plane and Pilot

JULY 1, 2025

John Espe Cruiser Buhl, Idaho/Injuries: None NTSB Report: WPR23LA29 The pilot of the tailwheel-equipped airplane reported that, during the landing, he encountered a gusting tail wind. Probable cause(s): The pilot’s failure to maintain airplane control during landing with a gusting tail wind.

Density Altitude

Vintage Aviation News

DECEMBER 26, 2024

Flying against Captain Tom Curtis, the two “Sixes” engaged in a “vertical rolling scissors” maneuver at 38,000 feet (11,600 meters), trying to get behind the other’s tail. Foust did everything in his training to try and recover from the spin, including deploying his plane’s drag chute.

Pitot Tube

Vintage Aviation News

FEBRUARY 16, 2025

One example, tail number M-585, c/n 843, was flown by its crew to Australia on March 8, 1942, and was later requisitioned by the US Army Air Force in Australia and given the serial number 42-68358 and was flown by the USAAF until it was stricken from the inventory in August 1944. The Air Battle for the Indies, by P.C.

Cockpit

Flying Magazine

JULY 31, 2025

Subscribe Now We pushed back from the gate in anticipation of a quick spray of Type I deicing fluid to melt a thin layer of frost on the wings and tail. We dragged our bags and our weariness into the hotel room. Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats. The captain’s PA confirmed it.

Cockpit

AV Web

DECEMBER 3, 2024

A pair of aerodynamic researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have created a raptor-inspired drone that uses its tail feathers to control bank, rather than wingtip feathers mimicked by ailerons on airplanes. The turns could be executed at low and high speeds as the raptors maneuvered.

Tail

Flying Magazine

APRIL 30, 2024

An unbuilt concept, the Douglas DC-8 Skybus aimed to position two V-12 piston engines in the forward fuselage and link them with two contra-rotating propellers in the tail. A ventral stabilizer doubled as propeller protection in the event of over-rotation or tail strikes. Neither aircraft would advance beyond the development stage.

Drag

Flying Magazine

MAY 14, 2024

The most significant visual differences were the T-46’s high wing and the “H” tail, with twin vertical stabilizers mounted to the ends of the horizontal stabilizer that strongly resembled those of the company’s previous jet, the A-10 Thunderbolt II. As outlined in a U.S.

Horizontal Stabilizer

Simple Flying

JULY 23, 2024

Aircraft are fitted with wingtip devices, generally known as winglets or sharklets, to minimize aerodynamic drag and increase fuel efficiency, and state-of-the-art engines reduce sound and wear and tear. Significant advances in aviation technology have occurred over the last few decades.

Stability

Vintage Aviation News

OCTOBER 12, 2024

Additionally, the S-72 was equipped with a low-drag fuselage, allowing it to achieve a maximum speed of 340 knots in a dive. Notably, one significant test involved measuring the vertical drag of the airframe using the main and tail rotor load measurement system, further contributing to valuable data in rotorcraft aerodynamics.

Drag

Flight Training Central

MAY 6, 2024

Those struts and wires create a lot of parasite drag, an anathema for aircraft whose design and mission is speed. Then in 1956 Cessna moved the tail-wheel on the 170 to the nose and the resulting high wing 172, with well over 40,000 copies, became the best-selling civilian aircraft in history. The bi-wing design has one serious flaw.

Drag

Pilot's Life Blog

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

The tradition of cutting the shirt tail of a student pilot after their first solo flight dates back to the early days of aviation. There are a few references to where this came from historically – let’s explore the heavy plane tail, the clipping, of birds wings, and the Navy.

Pilot

Pilot's Life Blog

MARCH 15, 2024

Below are other critical pieces of the wings that help give the plane additional lift, reduce drag, or achieve lower speeds in preparation for landing: Ailerons: A French word meaning “fin” or “little wing,” the aileron helps control the airplane’s roll. What are the basic parts of this section?

Horizontal Stabilizer

Vintage Aviation News

JULY 23, 2024

This is consistent with the theory, as a displaced torpedo would have bulged the bomb bay doors, which wind resistance could then have pealed back – leading to a rapid increase in drag preventing the aircraft from gaining altitude at sufficient speed.

Cockpit

Plane and Pilot

AUGUST 18, 2024

Most of the time, I would turn the floatplane setting the tails of the floats onto the shore in order to make our departure a simple matter of climbing in, starting the engine, and with a burst of throttle, sliding into the deeper water and going about our day. In short order, we loaded our gear and beat a hasty retreat back to Ketchikan.

Airplanes

Plane and Pilot

AUGUST 18, 2024

Most of the time, I would turn the floatplane setting the tails of the floats onto the shore in order to make our departure a simple matter of climbing in, starting the engine, and with a burst of throttle, sliding into the deeper water and going about our day. In short order, we loaded our gear and beat a hasty retreat back to Ketchikan.

Airplanes

Pilot Institute

NOVEMBER 1, 2024

And ice doesn’t just make things slippery, it messes with the airflow over the wings, cuts down on lift, and ramps up drag. Remember that wings, propeller blades, and tail surfaces are airfoil-shaped. This leads to a serious loss of lift and an increase in drag. If you don’t act quickly, you’ll soon feel its effects.

Pitot Tube

Vintage Aviation News

OCTOBER 11, 2024

However, this wasn’t the only unique thing about Cierva Twin; it was outstanding in its class for the following reasons – Coaxial Rotor System – This design eliminated the need for a tail rotor, reducing mechanical complexity and increasing lift efficiency. This allowed for more stability and control, especially in hover.

Tail

World Airline News

OCTOBER 29, 2024

From Delta Air Lines: Go behind the scenes with two teams who play a key part in the product strategy and engineering aspect of a nose-to-tail cabin redesign. Debuting on a narrowbody Boeing 757 aircraft that will begin flying on domestic and short haul international routes later this fall, followed by a widebody Airbus A350 in early 2025.

Tail