Tony Verhulst wrote:

A 3 degree glide angle is a slightly over 19:1 glide ratio. This is
high school trigonometry - simply look up the cotangent of 3 (the
value of y/x). Not quite as good as a 2-33 :-).


Yeah, I know, cot = adjacent/opposite - x/y. I hate typos :-).

Not all calculators have cotan (my computer's desktop calculator
doesn't, nor does my HP-28S), but 1/tan(x) gives the same answer.

If the angle is less than approximately 4.5 degrees it doesn't much
matter whether you use tan or sin - for a 3 degree glide slope the
difference is tiny: 1:19.081 vs. 1:19.107 - an error of just over 0.1%.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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