Aircraft Static Stability

In this video you will learn about aircraft static stability, which relates to the amount of work to pilot the plane.

When we talk about Static Stability in flight testing, what do we really mean? Picture this is an example, take a large shallow bowl placed upside down on the countertop and place a basketball on top of it. If you displace the basketball it'll continue rolling forever. That's a statically unstable system. Statically stable system would be if you put the ball right side up on the counter but the basketball in the middle, know if you displace it and release it will tend to return to in the center. The same is true for a statically stable airplane, it will respond to control surface inputs but will return to straight level flight as soon as you release them, or tend to at least. We talk about three axes when we talk about static stability in flight testing. The longitudinal axis is the pitch axis, the lateral axis is the roll axis and the directional axis is the yaw axis. It's important to establish the static stability the airplane because this directly correlates to the amount of work the pilot has to do to safely control it. That's why we tend to spend quite a bit of time on these tests in flight testing.

[mehmetkara]

The longitudinal axis is the roll axis. Lateral axis is the pitch axis. Also the directional axis is not a thing it's called normal or vertical axis and affected by yaw.