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About This Quiz
If you want, you can Google the plans for a flying machine drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci back in the early 1500s. He was fascinated by the subject and had drawn hundreds and hundreds of plans and written a ton on the subject. There's no evidence he ever built his machine, and that's probably for the best as the knowledge we have today tells us that there's no way it would have worked. But the idea was there! And it never went away. And then on Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright brothers tested their very first plane at Kitty Hawk and made four very brief but overall successful flights. And in just over 100 years look how far we've come! The Concorde could cross the ocean at speeds topping 1,300 miles per hour. The Airbus A380 plane had a wingspan of 262 feet and could carry 500 passengers. That's an incredible evolution! And learning everything needed to fly these things is not easy.
If you have a bit of a pilot's heart, that love of freedom and taking to the air in defiance of gravity, then prove to us you know your stuff. Hop in the pilot's seat and take the quiz!
Kilometers
Meters
The problem with imperial versus metric measurements is that there's no worldwide standard for something as basic as altitude. While they measure in feet in America, you'll be doing it in meters in a place like Russia.
Yards
Fathoms
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6,000 lbs
7,500 lbs
A commuter aircraft has to carry passengers on at least 5 round trips per week and the max payload has to be no more than 7,500 lbs. They also have to have under 30 passenger seats.
9,500 lbs
10,000 lbs
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Pitch movements
A variometer is a simple gauge that can be as simple as a ball in a tube. It is used to measure changes in the pitch of the plane, no matter how subtle they may be. What does that mean? The rate of climb or descent basically.
Air temperature
Drag
Velocity
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Rudder
Your plane has a vertical airfoil that has two important parts; the fin and the rudder. Your rudder is what moves to affect the yaw of the plane, which is what causes the plane to rotate left or right in the opposite direction it might roll. The fin, on the other hand, stays stationary.
Both
Fin
Neither
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Set altitude
Static altitude
Conventional altitude
Cruising altitude
Your cruising altitude is the constant highest altitude that a plane stays at for the majority of its flight with the exception of its ascent and descent and any corrections that need to be made for weather or other circumstances.
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Elevation Test
Emergency Locator Transmitter
ELT stands for emergency locator transmitter, which is a piece of equipment that broadcasts an emergency signal on a designated frequency in the event that an accident or other emergency occurs. It can either be set off automatically or you may have to do it manually.
Extended Length Turn
Emergency Landing Technique
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The right to fly from one's own country to another
The right to refuel in a foreign country
The right to overfly a foreign country without landing
The Chicago Convention lays out a set of 9 freedoms that are part of the International Civil Aviation Organization. The first of these freedoms which coordinate and regulate international air travel gives you the right to overfly a foreign country without landing.
The right to fly from a foreign country to one's own
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Washington, D.C.
Located in Washington, D.C., the National Flight Data Center is a facility that was started by the FAA and is basically the central hub of all relevant data and information needed for the flight industry whether government, military or commercial.
New York, New York
Seattle, Washington
Chicago, Illinois
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Vertical
A plane works in three dimensions so it can move along three separate principal axes. Adverse yaw occurs along the vertical axis. If there were a spike right through the middle of the plane going up and down, adverse yaw would be when it spins to the left or right on that axis.
Transverse
Longitudinal
Horizontal
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Vertical
Transverse
Longitudinal
Roll occurs on a plane's longitudinal axis. You can imagine this axis running the length of the plane from nose to tail, and roll occurs as the plane rotates on that axis. So if the left wing lifts and the right wing dips, that's a roll.
Horizontal
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Variometer
Flight director system
Non-directional beacon
Altimeter
Altitude is measured by the altimeter, which tells you the plane's altitude above sea level. It determines altitude by measuring atmospheric pressure and needs to be adjusted to account for local barometric pressure.
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Cruising altitude variation units
Ceiling and visibility unlimited
CAVU is a meteorological term that means ceiling and visibility unlimited and refers to ideal flying conditions. Visibility should be 10 miles and your ceiling should be 10,000 feet.
Central aviation variometer units
Central airport visibility unlimited
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The plane deviated to the right.
The course deviation indicator, or CDI, is a gauge that shows the plane's position in relation to a course that's been set out by some kind of radio beacon. If the needle is pointing left then you have gone off course to the right. When you're on course the needle will be straight.
The plane deviated to the left.
The landing zone is to the left.
The flight path is being updated to the left.
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Upwind
Headwind
Crosswind
If the wind is blowing and it's not directly in line with the plane, then that can be classified as a crosswind. Basically any wind that isn't perfectly parallel to the flight path is a crosswind and can make flying more difficult.
Driftwind
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Dead-stick
You're landing dead-stick if anything that propels the plane has stopped working. The engine and propeller are out and the pilot has to glide in for a landing if at all possible. The stick the term refers to is a reference to old-timey wooden propellers.
Deadweight
Blank
Blind
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Weight
Velocity
Drag
Drag is just part of physics, and even Aristotle understood the basic principles of it way back in the day. Something moving forward has a force acting against it essentially pushing back on that forward momentum.
Yaw
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Airfoil
Fuselage
Flaperon
Empennage
The empennage is what provides the stability to the plane during flight and consists of the entire tail assembly such as the rudder and fin. Without a vertical and horizontal stabilizer, it's nearly impossible to fly.
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Clips
Knots
A plane's speed is measured in knots, much like a boat. A knot is equal to one nautical mile per hour and a nautical mile is slightly different than your average everyday mile, so it's actually about 1.15 miles per hour.
Dens
Rips
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Squawk
Formally, you'd call this a transponder code but air traffic control will call it a squawk code. Every aircraft has its own squawk code that they use when speaking to air traffic control, and it helps them organize who and where everyone is in the sky.
Trip
Break
Freep
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Portage
Bus
Payload
The payload on an aircraft is anything that the plane is carrying above and beyond the essentials. Most people don't consider that if you break the word down it's a load that pays, which is what cargo or passengers are at the end of the day.
Breakage
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Hold cargo
Cover the wheels
Pants, arguably the best-named piece of equipment in aviation, are also called fairings and they look basically like sleek, streamlined coverings for the wheels on a smaller plane. They help reduce drag on the plane overall.
Line the engine compartment
Secure fuel lines
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523 knots
550 knots
611 knots
667 knots
Supersonic speed is what you'd call anything that has exceeded Mach 1, otherwise known as the speed of sound. That works out to 768 miles per hour or, in proper aviation terms, 667 knots at 68F at sea level.
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Kasha's rule
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Pascal's law
Bernoulli's principle
Lift in an aircraft is explained by Bernoulli's principle, which says that an increase in the speed of a fluid, or in this case air, occurs with a decrease in pressure. So the faster you get that plane going on the runway the less pressure on the craft overall ... and boom, you have lift.
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Suppressor
Static wire
A static wire is a pretty simple tool which is literally just a wire that you can clip onto the plane to ground it during the fueling process. A static wire draws off static electricity so that you're not worrying about a spark starting a fire.
Insulation coil
Vent system
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1
3
4
5
There isn't just one speed for aircraft approach, and in fact, there are five categories for aircraft approach based on the kind of aircraft ranging from single-engine to jet airliners to military aircraft. Technically, there's a sixth category for helicopters, too.
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Soft field
When you can't find a nice, smooth paved runway at a typical airport, sometimes you need to go for something a little more rustic and dirty. In that case, you could make a soft field landing on a dirt runway.
Country road
Roughway
Breakway
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Vertical
Horizontal
Longitudinal
Transverse
Pitch is what occurs on the transverse axis of a plane. The transverse axis runs through the plane from the left side to the right side, so when you pitch on that access the nose will move up or down.
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Brink
Threshold
The threshold of a runway is often marked with something like lines or lights and is essentially a kind of border or end of the usable runway surface. It's kind of like a bookend for a runway.
Body
Roll-out
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Throttle
Control rod
Yoke
You'd likely hear someone in a movie call it a stick or just "the controls," but the proper name for the control wheel of any aircraft is actually the yoke. Whether or not anyone in the cockpit uses that term is another matter.
Handle
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Absolute ceiling
The absolute ceiling is about as high as a plane can fly under normal conditions. Generally, the number an aircraft uses will be the service ceiling, which can be considered the maximum altitude an aircraft "should" fly at, rather than the absolute altitude it can achieve.
Top shelf
Break ceiling
Scuttle mark
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Tailwind
Turbulence
Wind shear
Wind shear contributed to 26 serious crashes between 1964 and 1985. By 1993, all commercial aircraft were required to have an onboard wind shear detection system to prevent any serious accidents.
Headwind
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Stutter step
Bait-and-switch
Touch-and-go
They call a landing in which you touch down and take off again a touch-and-go landing. Obviously this isn't an everyday technique, but it's something you might do when learning how to fly a fixed-wing aircraft.
Ping pong
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Ultralight
Ultralight aircraft are typically single-seat, slow-flying vehicles that don't even technically qualify as planes. They're flown for recreation and you don't even need pilot certification to use one. They're kind of like those electric scooters that you don't need a license to drive because they're glorified bicycles, but for the air.
Turboprop
Fixed-wing
Single engine
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Turbojet
Turboprop
Turboprop engines work by using the energy produced by the engine to get a turbine moving. That turbine then rotates the propeller which is what generates the thrust for the entire plane. Contrast that with a turbojet engine that uses no propeller but is powerful enough to generate thrust through the compression of air.
Tiltrotor
Turbofan
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Empennage
Elevon
Aileron
The aileron on a plane's wing is a hinged flap that you'll see along the flat, inside edge of a plane's wing. Used together on both wings the pilot raises and lowers the ailerons to control the plane's roll during flight, which is the up and down movement of the wings.
Corsair
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You Got:
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