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Image attribution: Piotr Jaworski, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
A
nice little animated GIF from Wikipedia showing how the flight controls
in an aircraft work. The rudder pedals and control column (also known
as the control stick, control yoke or control wheel) or joystick on more
modern aircraft, move the control surfaces to make the aircraft roll,
pitch or yaw.
A): aileron, B): control stick, C): elevator, D): rudder.
On
early aircraft, the linkages would have been steel cables like bicycle
brake cables or car handbrake cables, and control surfaces would have
been moved directly using only human power from the flight controls.
This system is still used on some light aircraft. As aircraft became
larger, it would have been infeasible to move heavy control surfaces by
hand simply because of their weight and aerodynamic forces on the
surfaces (like when you try to control an umbrella in high winds) so
hydraulics was used to move the surfaces (similar to the way a digger
works.) Nowadays, most aircraft are fly-by-wire, meaning when the pilot
moves the stick, a control signal is sent to either electrical or
hydraulic actuators that move the control surfaces. The Airbus A320 was
the first commercial aircraft to use this system in 1987 although
fighter aircraft previously used a version of the technology.
Fly-by-optics is another development, allowing higher data transfer
rates and immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI).
There's a discussion about fly-by-wire on Aviation StackExchange here:
There's a discussion about fly-by-wire on Aviation StackExchange here: