George Cayley's most sophisticated aircraft design appeared in Mechanics Magazine on September 25, 1852. Called the "governable parachute," it was in fact a human-carrying glider. Cayley regarded gliders and parachutes to be of the same class since they rely solely on gravity for maintaining airspeed. This 1852 glider design, though probably never built and flown, was thoroughly modern in concept and approach to flight.

Airplanes have three independent degrees of freedom: pitch, the motion of the nose up or down in a vertical plane; yaw, the motion of the nose to the right or left in a horizontal plane; and roll, a rotation to the right or left about an axis stretching from nose to tail. Pitch is controlled by the elevators. Yaw is controlled by the rudder. Roll is controlled by the ailerons.

Nominal flight configuration has pitch, yaw, and roll all equal to zero. This is level flight with the nose pointed in the direction of travel. A stable airplane, one safe and comfortable to fly, spontaneously returns to nominal flight if disturbed; an unstable airplane spontaneously tends to dangerously increasing values of one or more of these motions if disturbed.

Cayley's aircraft, the 1852 design among them, were the first in history inherently stable in pitch and roll in straight or slightly curved flight, and the first equipped with pilot-controlled elevators and rudders. Rudder and elevator were combined into a single cruciform tail. Both were movable, giving the pilot true control over the aircraft.

The 1852 design incorporated dihedral wings for built-in roll stability, but it did not include ailerons or any alternative way of changing the shape of thewings, making the glider difficult to steer. Fixed-wing designs such as Cayley's have no way of initiating or controlling roll and therefore cannot initiate banking turns. While capable of true flight in a straight line, they can accomplish turns only with great difficulty and are not truly navigable in the air.

Cayley's 1852 design had no onboard propulsion. Other earlier designs incorporated movable flappers separate from the fixed wings to generate thrust in the manner of birds. Cayley knew of the propeller but believed his flapper approach to be superior. Overall, the propeller receives very little mention or regard in Cayley's writings. Further, Cayley's power plant designs were crude and ineffective--understandable at a time when the science of thermodynamics and the technology of heat engines were both in their infancy.

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