AN ANALYTICAL JUSTIFICATION OF THE WIG-CRAFT ALTITUDE CONTROL LAW AND ITS IMPLEMENTATION TO ENSURE THE MAXIMUM TRANSPORT EFFICIENCY

摘要

The relevance of the paper is due to the discussion at the highest governmental levels in Russia. It is concerned with the appropriateness of reviving domestic WIG-craft making and the feasibility of building Russian heavy WIG-craft (ekranoplane) competitive in a specific market segment of high-speed vehicles. Russian Central Hydrofoil Design Bureau has already begun designing a universal platform of ocean WIG-craft, capable of operating far from land. Takeoff weight of the perspective WIG-craft will be about 500 tons. It will be used as a universal transport platform for the design of vessels for various applications. There are plenty of both supporters and opponents to this idea. Both use mainly the verbally formulated arguments that are not adequately backed up by any quantitative estimates of the transport efficiency of different WIGs in various flight conditions, and without clear criteria for evaluating the effectiveness. The paper proposes the criterion of performance evaluation that can be maximized for optimization of motion control law in the longitudinal plane.