Dashboards and Ailerons and Tail Wings, Oh My! Page 2

By SimHQ on July 26, 2006 in _air7, hide

That was pretty much all the descriptors they required, as they had the good common sense to not fool around with complex systems such as control surfaces. They just bent the whole wing around to make it roll left or right. The F-22 uses warp wing technology as well, and is no doubt being called revolutionary.

Well, aircraft have come a long way since then (advanced fighter jets notwithstanding), and as they became more complex, more names were handed out like a drunken engineer at the Ellis Island of Design. One can imagine them sitting behind a tall desk, slurring out “Sparksenator, um, skarpsgenerator, er, smarks.oh, to heck wisch it, your name is now magneto, welshome to aviation.you can enlisch wit the recruiter over dere!”

Let’s just review an airplane from front to rear, shall we.

First is the propeller. Same name from the Wright Flyer, but soon was incorrect once pushers became passé. A bladed object at the back of vehicle that pushes it forward is a propeller. The same thing at the front of a vehicle is a fan. What is in front of the radiator in your car — a propeller or a fan? I rest my case.

I’ll skip right over the engine and the inscrutable difference between an engine and a motor. With all the nautical borrowing of terms, why not this one? Then again, we’ve already delved into what the Wright brothers called some two-by-sixes laid out on the grass. We should just be grateful they didn’t refer to it as rotomechanicaloscillator.

Next is the fuselage. What? That’s the body of the airplane. The argument of using foreign words for common parts is silly. We don’t call the body of an automobile the fuselage, nor the wings Tragfluegel, for instance.

Speaking of which, we have the wings. Simple, right? Well, it would have been, but then they put these flappy up and down things on them to make the aircraft roll. No, they couldn’t call them wing controls. Aileron is the word, apparently because vowels could be bought six for a dollar that day; one suspects they were either fresh out of the letter U or were attempting to irritate the British, who put that vowel in unnecessary places all of the time (probably just to irritate us Americans). Much to the amusement of my squadmates, this aileron word is very difficult to remember and say in the heat of simulated battle, and so is often referred to by myself as the aforementioned wing control thingie. Flap would be good, but they used that for something else — the underspoilers that come down to provide extra lift when landing.

Cockpit is okay, I suppose, especially since piloting was a man’s game for a very long time (and still is today in large measure), if rather chauvinst. But within the cockpit some very strange things went on. The front bit with the gauges (er, excuse me, instruments, as if we’re playing music or performing dental work) is a console, rather than the more appropriate dashboard.

Throttle, rudder pedal, and altimeter are straight forward, and one can admire the honesty of turn and bank indicator, but the climb/decent indicator was called a variometer. Sounds like a mood ring for the pilot rather than something useful. Even more bizarrely, they put numbers on it, as if that means anything. They could replace them with smiley faces for all I care. The zero would be a neutral, the five and ten regular smiley faces (climbing / descending nicely), the 15 a winkey one (you’re going to stall or crash if you keep it here, you cheeky fellow!), and past that frowny faces (nothing good comes from anything past 15 for very long, in my experience).

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