flap

flap

1. Aviation a movable surface fixed to the trailing edge of an aircraft wing that increases lift during takeoff and drag during landing

2. Surgery a piece of tissue partially connected to the body, either following an amputation or to be used as a graft

flap

[flap]

(aerospace engineering)

Any control surface, such as a speed brake, dive brake, or dive-recovery brake, used primarily to increase the lift or drag on an airplane, or to aid in recovery from a dive.

Any rudder attached to a rocket and acting either in the air or within the jet stream.

flap

i. Auxiliary controls built into the wings and used to increase the camber. Flaps may be on the leading or the trailing edges. Trailing edge flaps reduce the stalling angle, whereas leading edge flaps increase the stalling angle when referred to the chord line of the original nonflapped airfoil. Flaps permit aircraft to fly at a lower speed, permitting better control on takeoff and a lower approach speed for landing. Flaps also increase drag, permitting aircraft to descend at a steeper angle. There are various kinds of flaps, such as splits, fowlers, zaps, and slotted.
ii. Short for cowl flaps. See cowl flap.
iii. The up-and-down movement of the tip of a helicopter rotor blade. See flapping.

FLAP

(1)

A symbolic mathematics package for IBM 360.

["FLAP Programmer's Manual", A.H. Morris Jr., TR-2558 (1971) US Naval Weapons Lab].

[Sammet 1969, p. 506].

flap

(storage, jargon)

To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and microtapes were 1, 2, etc. and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk.

The term is used, by extension, for unloading any magnetic tape. See also macrotape. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained.

The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.

flap

(networking)

See flapping router.

FLAP

The communications protocol used by AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). FLAP runs over TCP/IP and provides the header format for transmitting IM commands and data. It includes the SNAC data type, which is the primary data structure transmitted between clients and servers. See OSCAR.