by Dan Hampton
Despite knowledge of how these forces, axes, and controls function together, they are, without a pilot, just so much wood, metal, and cable. The pilot is the brain, the living computer, who makes these diverse components work harmoniously to produce flight, and it all comes together in the cockpit. The sixteenth-century term denoted a pit where bloody fights took place between animals or men and was later applied by mariners to describe a partially enclosed, sunken area on a ship’s deck occupied by the helmsman. As sailing and flying are both practical applications of fluid dynamics, it is natural that they share many terms: rudder, for example, or the concepts of pitch, roll, and yaw. As aircraft fuselages became more enclosed, the term cockpit seemed a natural fit for a small, semiprotected space where the craft could be controlled by a supine pilot.
There was resistance to this.
The Wright brothers, and others before them, believed that a pilot’s proper position was prone. This intuitively made sense to them for several reasons. First, a bird generally flies parallel to the relative wind, which exposes less of its body to the airflow, decreases drag, increases speed, and permits the greatest amount of air to flow over its wings. A prone position also allowed the Wrights to control the Flyer by shifting their weight like a bird or bat, since their wing-warping method of control was attached to the pilot’s hips.
Just to the left of the engine the cradle was attached by cables that ran outward to the wingtips, so by shifting his weight sideways the pilot would twist, or warp, the wingtips to turn the plane. The Wrights utilized a pair of levers (visible forward of the cradle) to move the rudder and elevators, which were at the front of their Flyer, rather than on the tail. It quickly became apparent to other designers that a seated position was more natural for a pilot, and that a yoke or joystick was easier to manipulate than levers. By the end of the first decade of manned flight this had become a more or less normal configuration that was permanently solidified by the Great War.
Air combat is fast; it requires instant maneuvering in multiple dimensions under increasing gravitational, or “g,” forces in order to aim and shoot. This new reality necessitated an efficient and relatively simple means of control since pilots had to be able to fight with their aircraft, not just fly it from point to point, along with navigating and managing weapons. As some 85 percent of humans are right-handed, it became understood that the stick, as the most sensitive control, would be manipulated by a pilot’s right hand.* It was only natural then that the throttle control be placed on the left side of the cockpit for the pilot’s other hand. This is a basic configuration that is still widely used today and adapted to all sorts of commercial, private, or military aircraft.
Great War fighters were highly visual machines as there were no aircraft-to-aircraft radio communications, and airborne radar was decades into the future. The Sopwith Pup is typical; a control stick with a firing button is operated by the pilot’s right hand. The throttle quadrant is visible on the left bulkhead and rudder pedals are just visible beneath the rudimentary instrument panel. By this time, especially in single-seat fighters, the importance of a sensible cockpit configuration was realized and being incorporated into new designs.
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, jet fighters like the North American F-86 ruled the sky; however, event though instrumentation and weapons capability had greatly advanced, the basic cockpit arrangement of stick, throttle, and rudder remained the same. The challenge of displaying and utilizing evolving technology to its best advantage is an ongoing process of refinement that also continues today.
Indeed, one of the most enduring aspects of aircraft development is that so much of it has remained consistent through the decades; enclosed cockpits and jet engines replaced older piston models and open cockpit fighters, but these are technical advances resulting from man’s innovativeness and external circumstances like the world wars. Great leaps are rare and widely spaced, but when they do occur and a wall is breached or the demon is sighted again, such leaps are often as drastic as they are enduring. There are constants, however; aerodynamic principles do not change, though our knowledge of them increases and we may utilize them better; and, fortunately, men do not change. There will always be those who are more than willing to take what we know and scream off into the blue in search of what we do not know.
Glossary
AAF: Army Air Force (United States).
ACCELERATION: a change in velocity over a specified time.
AERODYNAMICS: the study of air and the forces produced by its behavior.
AILERONS: rectangular surfaces on a wing’s trailing edge used to control rolling.
ALLIED POWERS: nations allied against the Axis during World War II; primarily the United States, the British Empire and her Commonwealth of Nations, China, and the Soviet Union.
ANGLE OF ATTACK: the longitudinal axis of an airfoil with relation to the relative wind.
AREA RULE: narrowing a fuselage at the wing juncture to reduce drag.
ASPECT RATIO: a ratio between the square of the wingspan and its total area.
ATTITUDE: the orientation of an aircraft in relation to the horizon, or any fixed reference.
AXIS POWERS: National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The name is taken from the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis.
BIPLANE: an aircraft with two sets of fixed wings.
CAMBER: the curve of an airfoil surface.
CENTER OF GRAVITY: an imaginary reference point for the center of mass within an object
CHORD LINE: a notional line running through a wing connecting the leading and trailing edges.
COMPRESSIBILITY: the change in volume of a solid or fluid in response to pressure.
CRITICAL MACH NUMBER: the lowest speed that some point on an aircraft becomes supersonic.
DIHEDRAL: in aerodynamics, an upward angle between two surfaces.
DOD: Department of Defense.
DRAG: in fluid dynamics, the cumulative resistance of everything affecting forward movement. For an aircraft, thrust must exceed drag for forward flight.
EXPERTEN: a somewhat ambiguous term for a Luftwaffe top scorer. Roughly equivalent in prestige to an Allied ace.
G-FORCE: for a human, this is an acceleration against gravity that is felt as weight.
IAS: indicated air speed.
JET: an engine that generates forward thrust by expelling high-pressure exhaust created through the combustion of compressed air.
JPL: Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
LIFT: an upward force produced by pressure differentials acting on an airfoil.
LOAD FACTOR: the ratio of generated lift to the overall weight of an aircraft.
MACH NUMBER: an aircraft’s velocity measured against the speed of sound.
MONOPLANE: an aircraft with single set of fixed wings.
NACA: National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
PITCH: a nose-up or -down attitude of an aircraft.
RAMJET: an engine that functions with no compressor. Forcible combustion occurs during flight as air funnels through a narrow tube.
SHOCK WAVE: an expansion of energy that propagates outward and results in a sudden change of density, temperature, and pressure.
SPEED OF SOUND: the distance traveled by a sound wave over a unit of time; at 32º F this is 1,087 ft/s, or 741 mph.
STALL: a point on an airfoil where airflow separates and effective lift ceases to be produced.
SUPERSONIC: movement of an object, or air around an object, faster than the speed of sound.
TAS: true air speed.
TRANSONIC: a notoriously ambiguous region of severe stress between an airfoil’s critical Mach number and approximately Mach 1.2 where airflow is erratic, unpredictable, and dangerous.
WEIGHT: the combined mass of an aircraft and everything in it. Must be overcome by lift for flight to occur.
WING AREA: wingspan multiplied by the chord.
WING LOAD
ING: total aircraft mass divided by the wing area. Essential in calculating lift and the overall maneuvering performance of an aircraft. The faster an aircraft flies, the more lift is produced by the wing, so a smaller wing can carry the same weight in level flight. However, greater speeds must then be maintained to produce lift.
WINGSPAN: distance from wingtip to wingtip.
YAW: A rotation around a perpendicular axis; for an aircraft, this is a side-to-side movement of the axis between the nose and tail.
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