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.).

Fuselage

An aircraft's main body structure housing the flight crew, passengers, and cargo and to which the wings, tail and, in most single-engined airplanes, engine are attached. French: fuselé, tapering.

source: FAA Aerosense Glossary

The section of the airplane that consists of the cabin and/or cockpit, containing seats for the occupants and the controls for the airplane.

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

The section of the WSC carriage that consists of the cockpit, containing seats for the occupants and attachments for the landing gear and wing. G loads. Load imposed on an airframe due to inertia (centrifugal force). 1G of load factor represents the weight of the actual aircraft. 2G represents effectively twice the aircraft's actual weight.

source: FAA Weight Shift Control Handbook (FAA-H-8083-5)

The fuselage is the main body of a plane (i.e. excluding the wings, tail, landing gear, etc.).

source: ICAO English Pro Aviation Glossary

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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.