The Dynamics of Flight, The Equations (Vol 1) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I feel very comfortable recommending this book for students taken their second/ advance courses in flight dynamics as well as to aerospace engineers who want to major in flight dynamics discipline. I, also, encourage beginners in flight dynamics to refer to some parts of this book that they will cover during their first course of flight dynamics if they are interested in more information and going deeper, particularly the first two chapters. I strongly believe that those doing their first course in flight dynamics will be in a very good shape if they use one or two of the following: Flight Dynamics Principles, Introduction to Aircraft Flight Dynamics, or Dynamics of Flight. This book is for high level.
As far as the goal of this book is concerned, the scope of this book starts form commenting on the procedure developed to get aircraft flight dynamics equations for a rigid airplane to comprehensive covering of the creations of these equations. For sure, students will cover the derivations of the equations of motion for a rigid airplane in their first course of this field. But for the sake of simplicity, they will make some assumptions and neglect several terms associated with these equations. They will end up with highly non-linear equations. After that, they will use, small-disturbance theory for linearizing these equations. Your instructor will inform you that if we do not make assumptions and omit some factors, we will obtain very huge and lengthy equations that you will find very difficult to imagine.
This book really puts you in the picture. It provides you with deep and unique analysis of these equations making them very powerful tools in your hand. The author has presented all of this clearly and in full detail in this book.
Before starting with chapter one of this book, the author did an excellent job by providing a nomenclature, in which you will learn how to write and pronounce the notations used in this book. I remember, in my first course in flight dynamics, that my instructor spent the first two weeks of the semester teaching us who to write and say these notations. We faced difficulties with this, as the book we were using did not do so. This book overcomes this negative feature.
More importantly, the author has shown great concerns about the students' understanding and progress. This is noticeable from the avenue and policy he followed through the chapters of this book. He started his first chapter with defining the airplane and Flight Dynamics as a field in aerospace engineering and showing the importance of stability and control in designing the airplane. Then, the game started when he applied the equations of equilibrium for level flight airplane. Your head will be refreshed with simple derivations of force, velocity...etc you already covered in your physics, calculus, and dynamics courses.
Next, in chapter two, he explained the concepts of Frame and transformation of matrix very well with excellent figures that make visualization of an airplane in 3-D to be no sweat. In point of fact, these figures are the best to describe these concepts than those available in the flight dynamics books mentioned above. In the following chapters, the author continued the study of airplane flight by deep analysis of the terms establishing the flight dynamics equations. This is done by a very well organized and simple presentation.
Finally, it is worth to mention that the eighth and ninth appendixes of this book have software for the numerical linearization plus calculation of the equilibrium respectively.

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The first of three volumes on the theory and practice of flight dynamics. Volume 1 describes the equations for the general case of a spherical rotating earth, which is then evaluated by examination of the flat, fixed earth, and presents equations designed to solve practical problems encountered by aeronautical engineers.

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