A direct look at the gyroscope recordings

Accumulated raw pitch-axis rotation across all 53 selected stretches

All 53 stretches end with accumulated pitch-axis increments in the nose-down direction. Thin lines show each recording; the thick line shows their median. Every line starts at zero. No line is reversed, stretched or scaled to match an expected result. The solid median covers the common first four minutes; the dashed median uses the recordings still available afterward, while at least five remain.

An IMU (inertial measurement unit) records angular and velocity increments. This plot sums the recorded gyro increments around the aircraft's right-pointing axis, using the mounting transformation preserved in the instrument configuration. It uses no fitted calibration, GPS subtraction, fused navigation attitude or assumed Earth-rate subtraction. GPS was used earlier to select these flight stretches; no receiver values enter the plotted angles.

The sum is a direct descriptive measurement. It includes aircraft pitching, coupling with other angular motion, instrument errors and any background angular field retained in the logs. It is not an isolated measurement of surface dip or a full three-dimensional attitude reconstruction. Normalizing each angular-rate vector to unit length would remove the magnitude needed to calculate angles, so the only display normalization is a common starting zero and the recorded axes.

The preserved one-second bins cover at least 99.5% of each selected interval; partial edge bins omitted by the earlier descriptive export are not filled in. There are no missing interior seconds in these traces. The bins already include the established per-configuration unit conversion. No new fits or raw-file decoding are required. Some simultaneous instrument records cover the same flight leg; 53 curves are not 53 independent flights.

Full-size image · Vector image · Plotted values · All flight stretches · Analysis method.

build_plot.py reproduces the figure from hash-checked preserved gyro bins. provenance.json records its inputs, coverage, endpoint summaries and output hashes.