A Retrospective Survey of Adverse Rotorcraft Pilot Couplings in European Perspective

摘要

Fixed and rotary wing pilots alike are familiar with potential instabilities or with annoying limit cycle oscillations that arise from the effort of controlling aircraft with high response actuation systems. Understanding, predicting and suppressing these inadvertent and sustained aircraft oscillations, known as Aircraft (Rotorcraft)-Pilot Couplings (A/RPCs) is a challenging problem for the designers. The goal of the present paper is to give an overview of the current status of A/RPCs from the European project ARISTOTEL (Aircraft and Rotorcraft Pilot Couplings - Tools and Techniques for Alleviation and Detection, 2010-2013'). It will be demonstrated that present and future trends on A/RPCs, show that, modern designs seem more RPC prone than their predecessors. The test results of a first bio-dynamic testing campaign performed in ARISTOTEL show that biodynamic feedthrough (BDFT) problems depend not only on more obvious features such as pilot weight and posture but also on more elusive factors such as pilot workload, task and manipulator characteristics. The greatest pilot handling qualities rating worsening due to biodynamic interaction between the pilot and the elastic accelerations corresponded to a central stick system.