Customer Reviews

Airplane Flight Dynamics and Automatic Flight Controls Part I

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This is a book written in a deliberately difficult style. Notation used for equations of motion and stability derivatives is non-standard. There is little in the way of solved examples
that can illustrate the basic principles to a student. A reader easily gets lost in the myriad of confusing mathematical details, without grasping the physical fundamentals. Not a very useful textbook in an introductory course on flight dynamics and controls.

Dr. Jan Roskam is a genius. He is an incredible airplane designer. Have you seen the Piaggio P-180? It's a beauty! His book is very useful if he is your teacher, but other than that it's very complex. That's probably just due to the high standards that he holds for everything. Never did I know there was so much to trim diagrams. I'm still kinda lost on them though.

This book appears to have been hastily put together from sketchy classnotes. As one of the previous reviewers pointed out, I'm sure this will prove to be an immensely useful book if you also happen to be fortunate enough to be taking Dr. Roskam's course.

The book does address some very important topics in aerodynamics and aircraft control theory. Unfortunately many key aspects are glossed over and the text is full of redundancies - for example, the definition of the aerodynamic center occurs at least 3 times. The same typographic font is used for both the equations and accompanying text, making the textbook very difficult to read.

None of this should detract from the fact that Dr. Roskam is undoubtedly a pioneering educator in the field of modern aerodynamics and aircraft control. I sincerely hope that some of his current or former graduate students will assist him in putting forth a more comprehensible edition of this important textbook.