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Aeronautics

Aeronautics is the study and development of the principles and technology of directed flight. As such, aeronautics encompasses the field of aviation as well as closely related fields, including ballistics, rocketry and orbital satellite navigation, ballooning, and dirigible technologies. Aeronautics in the contemporary sense is largely concerned with the core physics of aerodynamics and the applied sciences of aerospace engineering, flow dynamics (subsonic and supersonic), flight surface design, and other hard scientific pursuits—as well as the “soft science” aspects of manned flight, such as business and governmental involvement in military, commercial, and private aviation policy, planning, and practices.

Flight Theory Fundamentals

If there is an “Aerodynamics 101,” it can be summed up in four words: weight, lift, drag, and thrust. These are the four key aerodynamic principles specified by Sir George Cayley in his published works of 1809 and 1810. The builder of one of the first human-carrying gliders, Cayley conceived the inter-relationships of these four forces as they applied to the design and function of all flying devices. His work's fundamental theories were based on aeronautical ideas and works from the giants of philosophy and physical science since ancient times, with prominent names like Aristotle, Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Daniel Bernoulli all making their contributions.

Related and integral to these four forces are such design principles as the airfoil, flow separation, aspect ratio, angle of attack, and other aerodynamic fundamentals. Cayley experimented broadly to determine the aerodynamic efficiency of various combinations of such principles, devising and testing contraptions of many types. These ranged from hot-air balloons and dirigibles to triple-decked man-powered flapping-wing planes and included his very important study of whirling-arm gliders and planes, as well as much work devoted to hot-air engines (which were rendered irrelevant by the development of gas-fueled motors).

It was in his work on the whirling-arm glider, in 1804, that Cayley achieved the most viable and useful success in early heavier-than-air flight. Many of his published interpretations of the aeronautical truths he detected as he refined this invention have stood the test of time. Other ideas have been improved upon, some discarded outright. But even today's sophisticated, computer-aided aircraft design incorporates much of Cayley's discoveries about the lift, drag, thrust, and weight components of aerodynamics and their interplay.

Modern Flight

In 20th-century development of flight technology, many streams of applied science fed into aircraft design and deployment: materials science, mechanical engineering, fluid dynamics, and—especially during the last decades of the period—electronic engineering, which in its aviation applications came to be known as “avionics.”

One major theme of aeronautics in this expansive era and continuing into the 21st century has been the stability and reliability of aircraft design. Taken together, these two principles have provided the design basis for the explosive growth of aeronautics into the civilian sector, where flight has become an everyday, background feature of modern life. Inherent stability is a physics and design principle that is prudently crafted into most civil aviation aircraft. Inherent stability means that an aircraft will, by virtue of its fuselage and wing configuration, find and settle into its level, flight-maintaining attitude. This is in contrast to many military combat aircraft, for example, which are purposely designed so as to sacrifice stability in exchange for a far higher degree of maneuverability. Reliability in aeronautics has derived from materials science, engine technology and machining, better maintenance regimes, and the communications infrastructure that literally keeps pilots on course and out of harm's way.

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