How are gyroscopes used in airplanes?

Question

I was at the air and space museum in DC and noticed they were selling gyroscopes. Someone hinted to me that they are used alot in aerospace applications. What are they used for?

Answer 1

You have correct answers already for general application.  However since you were in a museum, I'll add an historic application.  They were also used to determine lead angle for early gun-sites.  The cross-hairs were etched in a mirror attached to a gyro.  A light shone on the mirror reflected the cross-hairs onto the windscreen.  

The gyro would lag the aircraft turn the amount of lead required to hit the target.  In an estimated lead turn the pilot put the pippler on the target to establish the correct lead angle.  This was an early form of kinematic, analog, ballistics.

Initially gyro stabilization, precession, was influenced by an electrical current in stabilizer fields.  Range rings enabled the current to be adjusted based on estimated range.  Later, range current was provided by 'Range Only' Radar.  

These were the gun-sites that gave the US an advantage over Migs in the Korean War.  Could not have been achieved without Gyros.

It's been more than forty years since I worked on these systems, but I think I have the basics right.

Answer 2

What Ralf said. But you have to understand more and more aircraft have Inertial Nav Units with Ring LASER Gyros in them now. No moving parts, the movement is detected by time variations of the light. Pretty sweet.

We've only got one on our particular model of C130, so we still have a compass system that uses a mechanical directional gyro and a vertical gyro. This of course, means we work on it a lot.

Answer 3

Gyroscopes are used in instrumentation. 3 of the six main instruments use them. The Directional Gyro (DG) also called the Heading Indicator (HI), the turn coordinator and the Attitude Indicator (AI). You can learn more about these by reading the FAA Pilots Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge .

http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/aviat...

Answer 4

for a compas is one use  your magnetic compas is the primary compas... but it flips around a lot and hard to read.. so wee put our heading  on a gyro compas and it will hold that info.. and every 30 minutes you have to reset it. refering again to the magnetic compas. ok

Answer 5

A spinning gyroscope will tend to remain pointed in the same direction no matter which way the airplane turns.  In an airplane, it can be attached to a card that has a horizontal line showing.  This is called an artificial horizon, and it tells the pilot whether he is climbing, diving, or banked left or right.  I'm told that it's very easy to lose your orientation if you don't have a good view of the ground due to haze, clouds, or darkness.

Answer 6

Attitude indicator, direction indicator, and turn indicator.

Answer 7

the first guy got it on the head

Answer 8

Gyroscopes have a quality known as 'rigidity in space', meaning that in a 3-D space, they will not move, as long as they have sufficient spinning speed.

Buy a gyroscope and spin it very quickly while atop something like a pencil. If you try to push it, it will resist you pushing it and will try to return to it's original orientation. That's rigidity in space.

There are 3 basic flight instruments that use gyroscopes:

1. They can be used as a reference to know your attitude, which tells you your angle of bank and your pitch up or down.

This is known as the attitude indicator, one of the most important basic flight instrument, because you can be upside-down and not be able to feel it, so you need to know the orientation of the aircraft.

2. They can tell you which direction you are facing, basically replicating a compass.

This is known as the heading indicator. Although all airplanes have a compass, a compass tends to have errors under certain conditions while turning or accelerating, so a heading indicator is used for this purpose.

3. They can also tell you how quickly you're turning.

This is part of the instrument known as the turn coordinator.

I do not know the relative importance of this instrument other than telling you when you're turning 2 degrees per second for a standard rate turn.