2 thoughts on “To Understand the Helicopter, You Must Understand the Gyroscope”
Descriptions based on angular momentum always fall short IMO. It is an abstract concept that’s difficult to visualize intuitively.
I think the best way to describe precession is to visualize a force on an element of the disc, as if it were a ball on a string. If you give the ball an upward impulse while it’s revolving around an axis, its trajectory will be bent upward such that reaches a peak 90 degrees later in its orbit. I think most people can wrap their head around that description.
Only when that’s understood should angular momentum be introduced as a shortcut to make the math easier.
Cute and clever but fails to answer the question it claims to. He demonstrates THAT it happens and that that is why the swash plate and cyclic are configured as they are with respect to pilot actions on the cyclic control, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the force acts “90 degrees out of phase.”
Descriptions based on angular momentum always fall short IMO. It is an abstract concept that’s difficult to visualize intuitively.
I think the best way to describe precession is to visualize a force on an element of the disc, as if it were a ball on a string. If you give the ball an upward impulse while it’s revolving around an axis, its trajectory will be bent upward such that reaches a peak 90 degrees later in its orbit. I think most people can wrap their head around that description.
Only when that’s understood should angular momentum be introduced as a shortcut to make the math easier.
Cute and clever but fails to answer the question it claims to. He demonstrates THAT it happens and that that is why the swash plate and cyclic are configured as they are with respect to pilot actions on the cyclic control, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the force acts “90 degrees out of phase.”