These notes are based on the AE2-211: Mechanics of Flight module lectures and handouts by Dr. Errikos Levis and Dr. Oliver Buxton from the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London.

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Course Outline

1. Introduction
2. Static Stability: We will look at the forces acting over the aircraft and how they affect its short term response to perturbations.
3. Equations of motion for a rigid body: We model the aircraft as a rigid body and determine the relevant equations of motion in a general set of coordinates.
4. Body fixed axes: We determine a set of coordinates that simplifies our subsequent calculations.
5. Forces and moments acting on the aircraft: We determine coordinate transformations such that we can obtain the gravitational force acting on the aircraft in the appropriate coordinate system.
6. State space analysis: We provide the conceptual framework to analyse the dynamical response of an aircraft to a perturbation
7. The aircrafts state equations: We write the equations of motion for our aircraft system into state space form
8. Wings level trimmed flight: We now limit our analysis to a special case, that of wings level trimmed flight.
9. Stability Derivatives: We derive analytical expressions for the effect that perturbations in the states have on aerodynamic forces and moments.
10. State-Space Structure: We separate the longitudinal and lateral parts of the dynamic system and approximate the conditions for stability.
11. Aircraft Dynamic Modes: We look at the structure of the dynamic system further to derive approximate relations for the six dynamic modes of conventional aircraft.
12. Control: We look at the effect of control inputs on the flight of the aircraft and derive the control forces required for a pitch-up manoeuvre.

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