TESTING A NEW NAVAL AVIATION RECOVERY MANOEUVRE

摘要

The Ship-board Rolling Vertical Landing (SRVL) is a novel manoeuvre conceived for the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, but never employed in legacy STOVL aircraft. Initial studies had demonstrated that, in benign conditions, SRVL was a simple piloting task. However, pilot-in-the-loop simulation of conditions with significant deck motion showed that aircraft would be lost if the piloting task was not simplified from that which was initially conceived. QinetiQ and the UK Air Warfare Centre addressed this and other issues via analysis and simulation-based experiments. To support a low pilot-workload approach, an innovative visual landing aid (VLA), known as the Bedford Array, was developed and tested in simulation. The implementation of this new device would result in design changes to the UK's future carriers, and the UK MoD therefore sought greater confidence in the proposed systems through in-flight evaluation. Since neither the future UK carrier nor the F-35B were yet in existence, the VAAC Harrier experimental aircraft, with its digital flight control system configured to be representative of the F-35B, was embarked on the UK CVS HMS ILLUSTRIOUS to conduct a flight evaluation at sea. Unique challenges were faced in making the flight evaluation representative of the F-35B recovering to a future UK carrier. These challenges, and their solutions, are reviewed. In addition, valuable lessons were learned in reinforcing the need for flight-test to validate, or in this case invalidate, results derived from pilot-in-the-loop simulation. This lesson proved once again that ground-based simulation, though of immense value, can on occasion give misleading results.