Sherpa Alliance

The airframe of a modern jet fighter plane (such as the F-22 or the F-35) is not designed with gliding in mind. Unlike other aircraft for which the airframe is structured for gliding, a modern jet fighter is designed to be implicitly unstable and in a state of disequilibrium. If you turn everything off, it crashes. Plain and simple. What keeps it in the air under normal circumstances? The fly-by-wire computers, keeping it stable by making micro-adjustments many times a second to cope with the disequilibrium.

This integrative thinking of being very unstable (an airframe not structured for gliding) and stable (the fly-by-wire computers) all at the same time is what gives modern jet fighters their immense agility. When we want to turn hard right, we can do so, very easily and very rapidly, tapping into the aircraft’s implicit instability and disequilibrium. There is less inertia to overcome than in an aircraft which is designed to glide and which, therefore, has more implicit stability.  See video of F-35 Fighter of the Future at the In the Driving seat channel on YouTube.

A modern jet fighter is designed as a cha-ordic “and” proposition, being a paradoxical blend of stable and unstable, all at the same time. Being more unstable (fly-by-wire computers which aren’t up to the job) or more stable (more gliding inertia to overcome) would result in fragility, either way around! Agility comes from a balanced, optimized blend, right down the middle.  Also see The Fighter Pilot’s OODA Loop