I want to write a short emphatic post making one major point. I’ve made it before, but I think it needs to be hammered home.
In addition to the links in this post, you could use the Tag Cloud to find related posts.
I mentioned in this happenings post, near the end, that I had found a nice introductory book on the control of aircraft (Thomas Yechout et al., “Introduction to Aircraft Flight Mechanics…”, AIAA 2003, ISBN 1-56347-4344).
I looked at it yesterday morning. I was planning to spend the day working on the next regression post … and I did … but I figured I’d turn my kid loose first, and he wanted to play in that book.
I still think it’s a nice book… but two of their drawings for rotations are mighty confusing… at first glance, they appear to be wrong. It turns out they are right, but the display is unusual.
I’ve talked about this out before, but let me put it in a post all by itself. (This post seemed essential when I thought they had made a mistake; it is merely desirable once I saw that the reader had to take a careful look at their drawings.)
Suppose we are given the following rotation matrix…