Aerospace Engineering Practice Exam

Dihedral refers to wings mounted so that the wingtips are higher than the wingroots, giving the wing a positive dihedral angle. This upward tilt creates lateral stability: when the aircraft banks or slides to one side, the lower wing tends to generate more lift, producing a restoring roll back toward level flight. Therefore, the described configuration—wingtips higher than the roots—is the dihedral arrangement.

The opposite would be anhedral, where the wingtips are lower than the roots, which reduces lateral stability; a wing with no dihedral has zero dihedral angle; and dihedral is about the vertical wing angle, not the sweep angle, which is a separate measure of how far the wing is angled forward or backward.