How are gyroscopes used in airplanes?
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
