Studies of Some Effects of Airplane Configuration on the Response to Longitudinal Control in Landing Approaches

The investigation reported in this paper was undertaken to see whether there are inherent differences in the response of the flightpath angle to control movements between swept-wing airplanes having no horizontal tail and using trailing-edge flaps for longitudinal control and conventional airplanes that are known to have satisfactory response characteristics. Particular emphasis is placed on the final few seconds of the landing approach. This study shows that the only difference in the short-time response of the flight path between the two types of airplanes is in a time lag in the flight-path angle response of the swept-wing airplanes. This time lag was found to result from two factors: first, a relatively small value of the parameter,