page_title: Aircraft flight control system
section_title: Primary controls
hierarchical_section_title: Aircraft flight control system / Cockpit controls / Primary controls
caption_attribution_description: Sports - Aviation - Issy-les-Moulineaux (10 septembre) - Le Blériot VIII dans l'un de ses plus beaux vols (700 à 800 mètres) Circuit en boucle, du 7 au 17 août 1910, reliant les villes de Troyes, Nancy, Charleville-Mézières, Douai et Amiens. Éditeur: N.D. HOT Adresse actuelle&#160;: Héliport Date&#160;: 1910
context_page_description: A conventional fixed-wing aircraft flight control system consists of flight control surfaces, the respective cockpit controls, connecting linkages, and the necessary operating mechanisms to control an aircraft's direction in flight. Aircraft engine controls are also considered as flight controls as they change speed.
  The fundamentals of aircraft controls are explained in flight dynamics. The basic system in use on aircraft first appeared in a readily recognizable form as early as April 1908, on Louis Blériot's Blériot VIII pioneer-era monoplane design.
context_section_description: Generally, the primary cockpit flight controls are arranged as follows:
  a control yoke (also known as a control column), centre stick or side-stick (the latter two also colloquially known as a control or joystick), governs the aircraft's roll and pitch by moving the ailerons (or activating wing warping on some very early aircraft designs) when turned or deflected left and right, and moves the elevators when moved backwards or forwards
  rudder pedals, or the earlier, pre-1919 "rudder bar", to control yaw, which move the rudder; left foot forward will move the rudder left for instance.
  throttle controls to control engine speed or thrust for powered aircraft.
  The control yokes also vary greatly amongst aircraft. There are yokes where roll is controlled by rotating the yoke clockwise/counterclockwise (like steering a car) and pitch is controlled by tilting the control column towards you or away from you, but in others the pitch is controlled by sliding the yoke into and out of the instrument panel (like most Cessnas, such as the 152 and 172), and in some the roll is controlled by sliding the whole yoke to the left and right (like the Cessna 162). Centre sticks also vary between aircraft. Some are directly connected to the control surfaces using cables, others (fly-by-wire airplanes) have a computer in between which then controls the electrical actuators.
  Even when an aircraft uses variant flight control surfaces such as a V-tail ruddervator, flaperons, or elevons, to avoid pilot confusion the aircraft's flight control system will still be designed so that the stick or yoke controls pitch and roll conventionally, as will the rudder pedals for yaw.  The basic pattern for modern flight controls was pioneered by French aviation figure Robert Esnault-Pelterie, with fellow French aviator Louis Blériot popularizing Esnault-Pelterie's control format initially on Louis' Blériot VIII monoplane in April 1908, and standardizing the format on the July 1909 Channel-crossing Blériot XI. Flight control has long been taught in such fashion for many decades, as popularized in ab initio instructional books such as the 1944 work Stick and Rudder.
  In some aircraft, the control surfaces are not manipulated with a linkage. In ultralight aircraft and motorized hang gliders, for example, there is no mechanism at all. Instead, the pilot just grabs the lifting surface by hand (using a rigid frame that hangs from its underside) and moves it.
caption: Blériot VIII at Issy-les-Moulineaux, the first flightworthy aircraft design to have the initial form of modern flight controls for the pilot
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