What control actually turns your airplane? Aileron? Rudder? The answer may surprise you. Your airplane needs a certain minimum amount of energy, call it airspeed, to lift off the ground and fly. If ...

It’s the stuff of science fiction: walk out to your airplane, strap in, and, instead of a control wheel and assortment of dials and levers, you are presented with a slender device resembling an iPad.

Simplifying flight—to make it as easy as getting into a car with automatic transmission—has long eluded the aerospace engineers creating new aircraft. While we’ve relied on flight controls such as ...