page_title: Air brake (aeronautics)
section_title: Split control surfaces
hierarchical_section_title: Air brake (aeronautics) / Split control surfaces
caption_attribution_description: Original Description: Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely at 5:32 p.m. EST on Dec. 22, at Kennedy Space Center to bring STS-116's successful mission to the International Space Station to an end. The mission continued the on-orbit construction of the station and delivered a new Expedition 14 crew member.
context_page_description: In aeronautics, air brakes or speed brakes are a type of flight control surfaces used on an aircraft to increase drag or increase the angle of approach during landing. Air brakes differ from spoilers in that air brakes are designed to increase drag while making little change to lift, whereas spoilers reduce the lift-to-drag ratio and require a higher angle of attack to maintain lift, resulting in a higher stall speed.
  The earliest known air brake was developed in 1931 and deployed on the wing support struts. Not long after, air brakes located on the bottom of the wing's trailing edge were developed and became the standard type of aircraft air brake for decades.
  In 1936, Hans Jacobs, who headed Nazi Germany's Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug glider research organization before World War II, developed blade-style self-operating dive brakes, on the upper and lower surface of each wing, for gliders. Most early gliders were equipped with spoilers on the wings in order to adjust their angle of descent during approach to landing. More modern gliders use air brakes which may spoil lift as well as increase drag, dependent on where they are positioned.
context_section_description: The deceleron is an aileron that functions normally in flight but can split in half such that the top half goes up as the bottom half goes down to brake. This technique was first used on the F-89 Scorpion and has since been used by Northrop on several aircraft, including the B-2 Spirit.
  The Space Shuttle used a similar system. The vertically-split rudder opened in "clamshell" fashion on landing to act as a speed brake.
caption: Space Shuttle Discovery on landing, showing its rudder deployed in speed brake mode
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