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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

Remote control airplanes have been using gyros to achieve the same effect for some time now. It's a complete game changer and changes the amount of enjoyment in a huge way. Instead of telling the airplane what to do, you're more so telling the airplane where to go.

I'm not suggesting gyros are the correct way to do this. But I can say the difference is night and day.

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Rc planes are a few orders of magnitude smaller than commercial aircraft. They have practically no flex and therefore fatigue.

A gyro large enough to counter turbulence in an airliner would be too heavy to fly and too the fuselage apart

It isn't a gyroscope that physically resists rotation. It is an active sensor that is used to control a PID loop to control the actuators and reduce the disturbance.

The technology in the linked article is even different, they put a sensor far in front of the wing and preemptively control the surfaces to counteract turbulence.

The gyros in RC are misleading. They are a sensor (gyrometer) which isn't using mass to counter movement, the are merely letting the plane know when it has shifted so it can move the control surfaces accordingly. Gyros have mostly been replaced by accelerometers at this point.

I've occasionally thought about getting into RC planes, but the piloting of them always seemed too hard. I'd love some links to what you're talking about if you have some to recommend?

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