Aviation Glossary

At Dauntless, our editorial staff maintains the web's largest unified glossary of aviation terms. This glossary is built from a combination of official, quasi-official, and proprietary sources (including original material that we develop oursselves). Uniquely, we often provide multiple definitions of a given term so that you can find that which best applies to you. In order to maximize your learning efficiency, this glossary (and similar ones for our international users) is incresingly fully integrated into our aviation learning apps, including our FAA written test prep and FAA practical test prep software and apps. If you like this glossary, you'll love them with their polished learning environments and world's best and clearest content (please do give them a try.).

Floating

A signal line is said to be "floating" if it is not connected to any voltage supply, ground, or ground-referenced signal source.
Examples:
- An open-drain, high-impedance (hi-z) output when in the off (hi-z) mode
- In microcomputer systems, a data or address bus may, at times, be undriven (floating). This is permissible because control signals indicate when data is valid, so users of the bus know when the signal can be ignored.
One form of non-volatile memory device is achieved via floating gates. The gate of a MOSFET has no connection, allowing charge to remain indefinitely. The gate charge is changed using Fowler-Nordheim tunneling or hot-carrier injection. EPROM, EEPROM, and flash memory are examples.

source: Electrical Engineering Glossary

A condition when landing where the airplane does not settle to the runway due to excessive airspeed.

source: FAA Airplane Flying Handbook (FAA-H-8083-3A)

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Disclaimer: While this glossary in most cases is likely to be highly accurate and useful, sometimes, for any number of editorial, transcription, technical, and other reasons, it might not be. Additionally, as somtimes you may have found yourself brought to this page through an automated term matching system, you may find definitions here that do not match the cotext or application in which you saw the original term. Please use your good judgement when using this resource.