Longitudinal stability and control is concerned with an airplane’s pitching motion, lateral stability, and

control relates to an airplane’s rolling motion, and directional stability and control relates to an
airplane’s yawing motion. Lateral and directional stability are closely interrelated and, therefore, the
two are sometimes simply referred to as lateral stability.

Longitudinal stability (PITCH): Since longitudinal stability can be considered independent of lateral and
directional stability, it is discussed first. Consider an airplane ‘trimmed’ (compensation to stabilizers) to
fly at some angle of attack , 𝛼𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑚 . This statement says that the airplane is in equilibrium and there are
no moments tending to pitch the airplane about its center of gravity.

EXAMEN

The figure shows how pitch equilibrium is achieved for an airplane. The forces acting are the weight
through the center of gravity, the lift and drag at the aerodynamic center, and the thrust along the
thrust line. The aerodynamic center of the airplane usually is very close to the aerodynamic center of
the wing alone. In this example it lies in back and above the center of gravity. The thrust line may lie
above or below the center of gravity; in this case, above. The moments about the center of gravity are
the forces times the distance between them and the center of gravity. It is seen in this case that the lift
and thrust both contribute nose-down moments whereas the drag contributes a nose up moment.

If these do not cancel each other out, the airplane will not be in equilibrium. It is evident that another
moment source is needed - the horizontal tail. The horizontal tail acts as a small wing and the pilot can
achieve lift or negative lift by elevator control. Because of the long moment arm from the center of
gravity to the aerodynamic center of the horizontal tail, only relatively small forces are needed. Thus,
the horizontal tail supplies the balancing moment as shown in figure 13 l(b). To fly in a particular
equilibrium condition, the elevator is "trimmed" to a particular angle. The total moment about the
airplane center of gravity is zero.

If the airplane is statically stable in a longitudinal sense, then if disturbed away from the trim angle of
attack, moments are generated that tend to return the airplane to the equilibrium 𝛼𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑚 . It is
customary to express the moment nondimensionally as a coefficient of moment about the center of
gravity, or (𝐶𝑚 )𝑐𝑔 .