Customer Reviews

Flight Dynamics Principles, Second Edition: A Linear Systems Approach to Aircraft Stability and Control (Elsevier Aerospace Engineering)

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One reviewer said this book wasn't right for US readers. I can understand this: I went to a UK university, did flight mechanics as a 2nd year undergrad and got mired in thousands of symbols for things.

The only books available to us back in 1995-6 were the excellent Etkin and the superb Stevens & Lewis... BUT both were expensive, used totally different symbology and conventions, and ft / lbs / secs. as units too (we used the SI system). This cost us a lot of time and effort - flight mechanics is about understanding aircraft, not about translating symbols between lecture notes and textbooks. It wasn't helped by the fact that we had a flight dynamics lecturer who neither liked nor understood what he was teaching (he told us!).

But a year or two later, this book came out and it was exactly what we should have used. The book used the same notation as our (British) lecturer had done. Better still, there were clear, step-by-step explanations, no nasty surprises, plenty of worked examples, no cop-outs like 'we intuitively see that...' The writing is clear and simple, no matter which system of symbols you're used to. If you're USA-based, you might be better suited to using Etkin, but if you work in the UK system, buy this book ! ! !

Overall, the book isn't bad. Yes, it is written for mostly a British audience but the concepts and procedures are still the same. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to know more about aircraft flight dynamics.

This book itself is okay. But it's not the right book for the US market. This is the first time my professor used this book, he thought it could be an improvement. But he gave up using it completely after a month into the course.

Some of the reference parameters are quite different from US standards, since the author is British. If you are a self-learner in the US, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.