Dynamic interface refers to shipboard aircraft launch and recovery operations including the testing required to determine flight envelope limits as a function of wind speed and direction. Ship-based flight operations must contend with challenges unique to the maritime environment such as ship motion and airwake turbulence created by the ship's superstructure. Ship airwake affects aircraft performance and handling qualities characteristics which in turn impact pilot workload. Ship airwake characteristics vary from ship to ship and also from one relative wind angle to the next for the same ship. The ability to assess ship airwake severity in a simulation environment allows airwake related design considerations, such as ship geometric layout and aircraft flight control design, to be addressed during the design process. NAVAIR has developed a desktop airwake analysis tool to model the handling characteristics of an aircraft when subjected to time accurate ship airwake velocities created with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The tool has been applied to multiple ship configurations to assess airwake impact on both rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft This work describes the real-time aircraft flight dynamics models and CFD airwake models that make up the airwake evaluation tool, summarizes verification and validation efforts, and describes the comparative process used to evaluate ship airwake severity for an example ship configuration.
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