Empennage
tail section of an aircraft containing stabilizers
The empennage ( or ), also known as the tail or tail assembly, is a structure at the rear of an aircraft that provides stability during flight, in a way similar to the feathers on an arrow. The term derives from the French language verb empenner which means "to feather an arrow". Most aircraft feature an empennage incorporating vertical and horizontal stabilising surfaces which stabilise the flight dynamics of yaw and pitch, as well as housing control surfaces.
Many early aircraft that lacked a stabilising empennage were virtually unflyable, despite having other effective control surfaces. Even so-called "tailless aircraft" usually have a tail fin (usually a vertical stabiliser). Heavier-than-air aircraft without any kind of empennage (such as the Northrop B-2) are rare, and generally use specially shaped airfoils whose trailing edge provide pitch stability, and rearward-swept wings, often with dihedral to provide the necessary yaw stability. In some aircraft with swept wings, the airfoil section or angle of incidence may change radically towards the tip.
Structure
Structurally, the empennage consists of the entire tail assembly, including the tailfin, the tailplane and the part of the fuselage to which these are attached. On an airliner this would be all the flying and control surfaces behind the rear pressure bulkhead.
The front (usually fixed) section of the tailplane is called the horizontal stabiliser and is used to provide pitch stability.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Empennage” as tail section of an aircraft containing stabilizers. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1506785. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Empennage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.