Is stick input considered “desired turn rate” “desired angle of attack” or something else?
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Aircraft originally used steel cables connecting every control surface to the stick or pedals. Even the engine throttle was controlled by a physical connection. However, much like your car, slowly we started to allow an electrical circuit to control the airplane. Though for a few years the planes with fly by wire also had a physical back up in case of failure. After a few years of safe flight records we trusted the electronics and computers enough to make places that operated solely on the electronics without any physical back up.
It was also a necessary advancement with jet engines. The air speed over a control surface that a modern jet produces would be incredibly difficult to manipulate without hydraulics. Which disconnects the physics cable from the control surface anyway.
Though as an added bonus, the computer could take an unstable plane and force it to be stable. For instance, the first stealth aircraft, the F117 would’ve been impossible to fly without a computer. It was unstable in pitch (up and down), roll (tilting side to side) and yaw (twisting side to side with the rudder). Under normal flight conditions the plane would actively be out of balance. The computer would read what the plane was doing, add or subtract the pilots control input, and then send that to the control surfaces multiple times a second. So even in straight and level flight the computer was making small adjustments to the control surfaces to keep the plane flying as intended.
It took a while for them to get the computer dialed in, so in testing it was nicknamed the “wobblin’ goblin” because the computer either over or undershot corrections and then had to catch up on the subsequent correction thus making the ride a little well, wobbly.
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