This is Stengel's contribution to the flight dynamics literature with some emphasis on controls. There are things I like about this book and things I do not like about this book. First, I like his statement and treatment of the equations of motion and the engineering and physics of flight and its control. The only problem I have with those parts of the book is that the Euler angle and quaternion sections have clearly been written by someone who has never had to actually use them in a simulation etc. The equations are, however, as far as I can tell correct. But the student/engineer will have to do some digging to get what they need. Second, there is an awful lot of good information in this book and it provides pretty much an all in one reference book for flight dynamics. Most of it is very readable.
Now for the parts I don't like. First, with just a little effort this book could have covered missiles as well as airplanes ( just like Blakelock ). This is not a big sin and is very popular though. Second, Stengel's treatment of the flight coefficients in the stability frame are strange and do not seem to follow the standard conventions. They are correct but the normalized approach developed by NACA and propounded by Blakelock led directly to servomotor design. There is an additional step in Stengel's approach. Several of his frames of reference seem to suffer from similar maladies. There is nothing wrong with this of course but it may be that he was so busy trying to leave his own mark that he did in fact neglect several aviation traditions in this domain. He does mention the old DATCOM work but one can not directly use DATCOM from his book without first doing some more work. Third, many of the most advanced concepts are glossed over or just touched upon. This is being sold as a textbook but it is really more of a treatise ( a not uncommon identity crisis these days ). Neural networks, modern controller designs, and others are just pranced over. The literature is cited however and of course one can just go look it up. A little more depth in some areas would have been appreciated, however. Fourth, evidently we can't have a book on flight dynamics without singing odes to lqr and lqg. These methods are popular with the state space crowd since normally there is no clearcut relationship between eigenvalue placement and phase margin. lqr in some of its incarnations is known to have excellent phase margin properties ranging as high as infinity. This is perfect impementation of course and lqg is standing by to solve that issue. These methods have their place in the control engineers arsenal but to use lar/lqg to establish the basic flight path of the aircraft with the pilots inputs just used to make small trim changes about that direction probably violates the current trend towards 100% control authority for at least some types of aircraft and the pilot needs to retain at least enough to be able to handle problems. When these idealistic problems are solved the lqr/lqg controller methods begin to look more like current controller designs.

Anyhow, this is an excellent book that any flight controls or aviation engineer will find more than just useful. It provides a pretty complete treatment of the state variable approach and should serve as an excellent starting point for those wanting to design actual controllers for aircraft.

This is Stengel's contribution to the flight dynamics literature with some emphasis on controls. There are things I like about this book and things I do not like about this book. First, I like his statement and treatment of the equations of motion and the engineering and physics of flight and its control. The only problem I have with those parts of the book is that the Euler angle and quaternion sections have clearly been written by someone who has never had to actually use them in a simulation etc. The equations are, however, as far as I can tell correct. But the student/engineer will have to do some digging to get what they need. Second, there is an awful lot of good information in this book and it provides pretty much an all in one reference book for flight dynamics. Most of it is very readable.
Now for the parts I don't like. First, with just a little effort this book could have covered missiles as well as airplanes ( just like Blakelock ). This is not a big sin and is very popular though. Second, Stengel's treatment of the flight coefficients in the stability frame are strange and do not seem to follow the standard conventions. They are correct but the normalized approach developed by NACA and propounded by Blakelock led directly to servomotor design. There is an additional step in Stengel's approach. Several of his frames of reference seem to suffer from similar maladies. There is nothing wrong with this of course but it may be that he was so busy trying to leave his own mark that he did in fact neglect several aviation traditions in this domain. He does mention the old DATCOM work but one can not directly use DATCOM from his book without first doing some more work. Third, many of the most advanced concepts are glossed over or just touched upon. This is being sold as a textbook but it is really more of a treatise ( a not uncommon identity crisis these days ). Neural networks, modern controller designs, and others are just pranced over. The literature is cited however and of course one can just go look it up. A little more depth in some areas would have been appreciated, however. Fourth, evidently we can't have a book on flight dynamics without singing odes to lqr and lqg. These methods are popular with the state space crowd since normally there is no clearcut relationship between eigenvalue placement and phase margin. lqr in some of its incarnations is known to have excellent phase margin properties ranging as high as infinity. This is perfect impementation of course and lqg is standing by to solve that issue. These methods have their place in the control engineers arsenal but to use lar/lqg to establish the basic flight path of the aircraft with the pilots inputs just used to make small trim changes about that direction probably violates the current trend towards 100% control authority for at least some types of aircraft and the pilot needs to retain at least enough to be able to handle problems. When these idealistic problems are solved the lqr/lqg controller methods begin to look more like current controller designs.

Anyhow, this is an excellent book that any flight controls or aviation engineer will find more than just useful. It provides a pretty complete treatment of the state variable approach and should serve as an excellent starting point for those wanting to design actual controllers for aircraft.