Talk:Aircraft principal axes

Incorrect Info / Revert

THIS PAGE IS MOSTLY INCORRECT. The lateral axis is only equivalent to 'pitch' when the roll angle is zero. The author has confused what longitudinal/lateral axes are, with what 'roll/pitch/yaw' Euler angles are.

THIS page should be deleted. 128.102.243.110 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:41, 19 May 2009 (UTC).

I want to add that these are also not "Principle Axes" as stated in the article itself.

I don't know what happened here. I saw that someone merged "Yaw Axis", probably in a well-intentioned attempt to reduce some chaos and redundancy. However, a cursory inspection suggests to me that some chaos and incorrectness has been introduced.

Gummer85 (talk) 04:17, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, I did the change and according with a NASA web page, pitch is any rotation around the lateral axis regardless of the roll angle. See [NASA definition for Pitch motion http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/pitch.html]. Of course, I know that the ussage that you propose is also valid, but is not the only one. --Juansempere (talk) 08:52, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

The merges, etc. that led to this page should all be reverted. There was indeed some chaos and redundancy in the way the information was organized before, but a lot of that was unavoidable by the nature of the collaboration of part time contributors. Importantly, while chaotic, the information was largely correct. The current structure is still chaotic, but has become largely incorrect. The changes were made without the kind of concurrence usually needed for this sort of thing. The changes should have been made in smaller doses to allow for concurrence to grow and time for the benefit of commentary and collaboration. I concur that some merging/reorganization was needed, but I suggest the right way is to go back and start again.

--Gummer85 (talk) 06:07, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Political Correctness

The page uses a military drone to illustrate pitch, yaw and roll (on 2019-05-27). Their current use is, can and has to be politically debated. There is no need to use a military example for a mathematical description, and it should be discouraged.

The image you describe, showing drawings of a drone, was inserted by Jarekt on 1 May 2015. Dolphin (t) 10:16, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

I found File:MISB ST 0601.8 - Yaw, Pitch & Roll.png to be more useful than other images when trying to understand the concept. The image has a lot of detail and related nomenclature and is in public domain. I can not tell military drones from non military drones, but if this image aircraft makes people uncomfortable we can search for non-controversial alternative and see if there are any graphic artists that are willing to reproduce the graphics using different aircraft. If results are equally good I have no objections to replacing this image. --Jarekt (talk) 02:26, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Major changes to articles on this subject

On 18 and 19 May 2009 some major changes were made to this article, and others related to it, by Juansempere and Gummer85. These changes have caused some confusion.

Theoretically it is possible to use History pages to track down what changes have been made, and by whom. However, a much better way is for users to make use of this Discussion page to broadcast their intentions for major changes, or to use it to explain what is happening, with a brief explanation as to why these changes will improve Wikipedia.

I invite firstly Juansempere, and then Gummer85 to explain their vision and their plans for this article, and other related articles. There is no objection to interested users making edits to these articles, but there are multiple users who are interested in them and these multiple users would like to know what is happening, and why, so they can monitor progress and perhaps assist. One of the strengths of Wikipedia is the opportunity for peer review of all changes, and especially major changes. Those peers come from all over the world and have a wide variety of useful backgrounds. Dolphin51 (talk) 06:19, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Looking through the histories, etc., it looks like in the span of 56 minutes about 12 hours ago, a large number of changes to structure were made and in a way that makes it difficult to peer review them (at least for my tiny brain). I made a few small edits to the "new" article, starting with a spelling correction. In this process, I saw the extent of the changes and inaccuracies that had been introduced. Disheartened at the work now needed in the "forward direction" to fix the article (and others affected), I wanted to disassociate from it, so I reverted my small edits. Thus, a quick scan of the history makes it look like I've made a lot of changes, but in fact I've made none. I have no vision for this article in particular except that I believe a more expeditious path to correctness and (better) organization of the information is in the "backwards direction" i.e. to revert to the state of 14 hours ago and restart Juansempere's improvements in a way that allows for collaboration. --Gummer85 (talk) 07:10, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Yaw, pitch and roll are used sometimes as Euler angles, and other times as rotations around the aircraft principal axes. What I have done is to move to this page all the information related to them as rotations, to keep it both ussages separated.

--Juansempere (talk) 08:18, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

In my experience as an aeronautical engineer, the term "Principal Axes" has been reserved for the actual set of vectors (eigenvectors) that make the products of inertia zero. What you are calling "Aircraft Principal Axes" are generally referred to by experts as the aircraft's "Axis System" or simply "Aircraft Axes", etc., be they the "body axes", "stability axes", or whatever axis system is dreamed up to be convenient.

I have found the NASA site you cite to be unreliable as a source of terminology as used by experts (or of reliable "explanations") as it is targeted at grades Kindergarden through 12. It's a good source of cut and paste diagrams and gifs, but text, terminology, and definitions from it should be viewed with a skeptical, professional eye.

--Gummer85 (talk) 08:57, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Juansempere, and thanks Gummer85, for acknowledging my request and logging in to this discussion.

Now, we need to get down to business. I think the best thing Juansempere can do at this stage is to describe what he has done, in terms of what new articles have been created, what re-directs have been created, and what text has been cut from one place and pasted into another. (It appears to me that text has disappeared from Yaw, pitch, and roll and re-appeared at Aircraft principal axes. However, I could be wrong; it seems confusing.)

Secondly, as you will both realise, in Wikipedia it does not matter what individual users believe to be true, even though they might hold those beliefs passionately. Wikipedia is based on information that is independently verifiable. At WP:Verifiability it says The threshhold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. So it is your in-line citations and references that will carry the most weight, not what you believe to be true. Thanks for your participation and your co-operation. Dolphin51 (talk) 10:06, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

First of all, no information from "Yaw, Pitch and Roll" article was removed. All that I did there was to put a link to this page which I quote "This article is for Yaw, pitch and roll used as Euler Angles. For its use as principal rotations see aircraft principal axes"

To make my point clear, the situation previous to my edition was that at wikipedia, "Yaw, Pitch and Roll" names were used both as names for Euler angles and for intrinsic aircraft rotations. For example the Flight Dynamics article considers them rotations. I was just trying to explain that this inconsistency arises from two different definitions and for this reason I expanded "Aircraft axes" to what it is now.

It seems that 128.102.243.110 tries to restrict the use of Yaw, Pitch and Roll words to refer to Euler Angles, forbiding its use as intrinsic rotations. I think this shouldn't be done because both meanings are in widespread use, even inside Wikipedia, as stated before.

The reference I gave before was taken from the Flight Dynamics article (which I didn't write or contribute) and should be accepted for consistency. I suppose that googling for a while I would find more references, but all of them will be equally clasified as learning material because academic articles do not speak about these things. Anyway, academic material available from a NASA website implies NASA endorses it, or at least don't dissaprove it, and even if it were an unusual convention (which I don't think is the case), Wikipedia "neutral point of view" forces us to explain it.

For all these reasons I hold that we should keep two different articles for speaking about "Yaw Pitch and Roll", both as Euler Angles and as intrinsic rotations. As I understand from 128.102.243.110 writings, we both agree that "Yaw, Pitch and Roll" article should remain as it is. Therefore is here where intrinsic rotations belong.

--Juansempere (talk) 13:39, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I am much in favor of being clear and making explicit discriminations between muddled concepts. In fact, I have made some "clarifying explicit discriminations" of my own (Dihedral Angle vs. Dihedral Effect for example). The need for such clarity in Wikipedia is never-ending as muddlings are pervasive. If "Yaw, Pitch and Roll" and other articles did not discriminate between a mathematician's usage and aeronautical usage, then that should be clarified and I applaud Juansempere's efforts in that regard. However, his process of correcting that was "too much too fast" so as to make peer review difficult. And, peer review was (and is) much needed as many errors from the aeronautical perspective were introduced. I STILL SAY REVERT and fix the original problems slowly, with clarity, and with the opportunity for peer review. The other way is an longer uphill slog. --Gummer85 (talk) 16:56, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi Juansempere and Gummer85. Thank you for your patience in explaining your position on this. My summary of the basics is as follows:

• The words yaw, pitch and roll can refer to two different concepts, depending on which author or source is being quoted. They can refer to Euler angles (axes fixed to a body) or to rotations of those angles.
• These words are used as Euler angles in Yaw, pitch, and roll; and as rotations in Fluid dynamics. In the article, Aircraft principal axes these words are used to mean rotations.
• The article Yaw axis has been re-worked by Juansempere and re-named as Aircraft principal axes.
• Gummer85 is in favour of Aircraft principal axes using these words as Euler angles.

Please comment on whether you agree the above summary is accurate. If not, what would be a more accurate of summarising each point. It will be good to determine what common ground exists.

Even though Gummer85 advocates reverting all the most recent changes, I am not in favour of this as it would be, or look like, an edit war, and such wars are unproductive in my experience. Instead, I suggest Gummer85 uses his existing sandbox, or a new one, to create his preferred version of Aircraft principal axes. That way we will be able to compare Juansempere's ideas and those of Gummer85, and comment on the details of what each one is proposing.

Thanks in anticipation. Dolphin51 (talk) 12:33, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

As far as a feared post-reversion edit war is concerned. I was never advocating particular points opposing Juansempere, just that the opportunity for collaboration from the start be reintroduced by reversion. I suppose I did (and do) oppose the introduction of the mathematical immaterialities and aeronautical incorrectnesses too, but those would have been avoided civilly via post-reversion collaboration (as opposed to a post-reversion edit war). As far as making a "preferred article" in a sand box, who has time for that? I don't care about the issue that much.  :-)

If we must slog forward, I am in favor of changing name of the article to "Aircraft Axes" and properly separating the mathematician's POV from the aeronautical POV, and in separate articles (this article is aeronautical). I am in favor of ensuring that all previous references and redirections to the destroyed articles refer here or to wherever they should refer. I am unsure that the easiest way to to do that isn't reversion (!) :-).

Rotations and Euler angles are not the actual subject here and I don't know why there is so much concern about them. Sure, the attitude of an aircraft is usually given in terms of "euler angles" (in the aeronautical sense) so the aeronautical "euler angles" could possibly be mentioned as the measure of the rotation of the aircraft axis system from horizontal (calling them yaw angle, pitch angle, and roll angle, not "euler angles"). BUT, "rotations" in general from an arbitrary attitude to another is just immaterial. "Euler angles" in the aeronautical sense, i.e. pitch angle, roll angle, and yaw angle, should be discussed elsewhere in aeronautics (are they?, I need to check) and that article should not be called "Euler Angles", but rather "Pitch, Roll, Yaw (aircraft)" or something like that. I don't have any opinion how a mathematician should describe such things in a math-oriented article, but this is an aeronautical-oriented article.

This article was created by modifying a disambiguation page and it still is one by the way. I'm not sure if its history like that confuses matters or not. I know it confuses me.

I am generally disheartened about the matter. I see this as an enthusiastic and well-intentioned expert in another field (math as far as I can tell) following orders and "being bold", which is not altogether a bad thing. But, boldness needs to be tempered when we are out of our fields. A lot of incorrectness was created by his overstepping, some of which had inappropriate weight via a dubious "authority" citation. I really want to back off on "contributing" to the difficult forward slog. If I can't get a consensus on reversion, that's okay I guess, but I'm going to have to quit the forward effort. I don't have the time for it, and I don't have the enthusiasm needed to compel me to make the time (i.e. whether it's good for me or not :-)).

--Gummer85 (talk) 19:52, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Hello Gummer85 , hello Dolphin51 (talk)

First of all, I agree with Gummer85 that to make a "preferred article" in a sand box is not a good idea. Better I would propose that he makes the changes he considers necesary on the article, and then I will comment them here. I really find his comments clear and accurate and in fact we both agree in mostly everything. In fact, the person that wanted to remove everything was not him, but somebody with the IP 128.102.243.110 instead.

About "all previous references and redirections to the destroyed articles" I really do not know what he refers to. All what I did was taking the page called "Aircraft axis" and moved it to "Aircraft principal axes" (because aircraft axis could refer to any possible axis that pases through the aircraft). Then I merged inside a previous article called "Yaw axis" and redirected it here. Then I made a link pointing here from the page "Yaw, pitch and roll".

About the name "Aircraft axes" or "Aircraft principal axes" I do not oppose to revertion of the name. But I really think that speak about aircraft axes in general is not accurate.

About the incorrectness that everybody speaks about, it is not mine. I copied the content of the article from the old article "Yaw axis" and from the article "Flight dynamics" and therefore any possible mistake was already in Wikipedia before my editings.

Finally, I need to apologize for the lack of trazability. I have tried to track myself and I agree it was difficult. I really was not thinking in trazability when I made the changes and I apologize for that.--Juansempere (talk) 09:28, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

References

Question

I've been thinking about this just recently and it has got me stumped and confused. If anyone can provide an explanation to this, I'll be very thankful.

• If Pitch (X-Axis) remains unchanged, then the Aircraft is Turning while Barrel Rolling.
• If Roll (Y-Axis) remains unchanged, then the Aircraft is Turning while Climbing/Diving.
• If Yaw (Z-Axis) remains unchanged, then the Aircraft is ???.

--Arima (talk) 07:18, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Not exactly. If an axis of the airplane remains constant, then the two angles that define it are constant, and the movement can only be a rotation around the constant axis. No turning will happen.

If you mean that the given angle of the axis, but not the axis itself, is constant (pitch, yaw and roll angles) then I suppose it can be said that the plain is climbing/diving while rolling.

I hope that helps.--Juansempere (talk) 10:39, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Animations

Can we get the "pitch" and "roll" thumbnail images to animate like the "yaw" thumbnail does?--71.104.224.34 (talk) 07:58, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Aircraft attitude

Aircraft_attitude redirects here, but nothing in the article explains what that is... could someone (explicitly) explain what that is?--portugal (talk) 10:07, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

The expression aircraft attitude is sometimes used to refer to the angle of the fuselage relative to the horizon, and the angle of bank relative to the horizon. It is not a precisely-defined expression. Dolphin (t) 11:45, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Question about the sign of roll

Is a positive roll angle the one where the right wing is closer to ground or further from ground? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.235.188.118 (talk) 07:26, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

There is no positive roll. There are only left and right roll. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:88:8104:D007:1D9B:99A3:17D1:AF35 (talk) 20:02, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Positive roll is stated in many references to be in the clockwise direction (ie, "right roll") as viewed from the center of gravity (cg) about the X-axis (ie, longitudinal axis). For example : - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_dynamics_(fixed-wing_aircraft) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304816895_Natural_user_interfaces_for_human-drone_multi-modal_interaction - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/spiral-mode - https://emissarydrones.com/what-is-roll-pitch-and-yaw

In the first figure positive roll is incorrectly depicted, and is contrary to the other two figures. Jax200 (talk) 18:12, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Merge

If you search for "Yaw, pitch, and roll" you will be redirected to Aircraft principal axes while you will be redirected to Flight dynamics (fixed-wing aircraft) if you search for "Yaw, pitch and roll". Since the same search (except a comma) will bring you to two different places a merger seems appropriate. Soerfm (talk) 10:57, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I've changed the redirect so both options direct to Aircraft principal axes. I disagree that they should be merged, flight dynamics is a broader topic than the axes, it's good to have the more specific information in the more specific page. Djr32 (talk) 20:56, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

As nobody else has commented in the nearly 5 months, I have removed the merge proposal tags. Djr32 (talk) 22:17, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

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