The World Of Aviation

At the rear of the fuselage of most aircraft one finds a vertical stabilizer and a rudder. The stabilizer is a fixed wing section whose job is to provide stability for the aircraft, to keep it flying straight. The vertical stabilizer prevents side-to-side, or yawing, motion of the aircraft nose. The rudder is the small moving section at the rear of the stabilizer that is attached to the fixed sections by hinges. Because the rudder moves, it varies the amount of force generated by the tail surface and is used to generate and control the yawing motion of the aircraft. This slide shows what happens when the pilot deflects the rudder, a hinged section at the rear of the vertical stabilizer.

The rudder is used to control the position of the nose of the aircraft. Interestingly, it is NOT used to turn the aircraft in flight. Aircraft turns are caused by banking the aircraft to one side using either ailerons or spoilers. The banking creates an unbalanced side force component of the large wing lift force which causes the aircraft's flight path to curve. The rudder input insures that the aircraft is properly aligned to the curved flight path during the maneuver. Otherwise, the aircraft would encounter additional drag or even a possible adverse yaw condition in which, due to increased drag from the control surfaces, the nose would move farther off the flight path.

The rudder works by changing the effective shape of the airfoil of the vertical stabilizer. As described on the shape effects slide, changing the angle of deflection at the rear of an airfoil will change the amount of lift generated by the foil. With increased deflection, the lift will increase in the opposite direction. The rudder and vertical stabilizer are mounted so that they will produce forces from side to side, not up and down. The side force (F) is applied through the center of pressure of the vertical stabilizer which is some distance (L) from the aircraft center of gravity. This creates a torque

on the aircraft and the aircraft rotates about its center of gravity. With greater rudder deflection to the left as viewed from the back of the aircraft, the force increases to the right. If the pilot reverses the rudder deflection to the right, the aircraft will yaw in the opposite direction. We have chosen to base the deflections on a view from the back of the aircraft towards the nose, because that is the direction in which the pilot is looking.