The Department of Defense is working toward a new doctrine in which manned and unmanned aircraft accomplish aerial missions in a cooperative environment. This goal is not without its fair share of challenges, given the staggering number of unmanned aircraft mishaps in the recent years. One incident almost resulted in fatalities when a UAV, suffering from loss of control, collided with a C-130 on final descent. That loss of control is what this undertaking aims to address--as a step toward establishing design criteria for UAV stability and control characteristics. In order to save cost, and rapidly generate aircraft simulations, an open-source flight dynamics model, known as JSBSim, was used to investigate the correlation between aircraft flying qualities and manned and unmanned handling qualities while performing a longitudinal tracking task. Ultimately there is no substitute for live flight test; for this reason, an F-16 software model was simulated in autonomous flight. Thus the results of this research should readily be comparable to future tests using the NF-16D Variable stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft (VISTA) operated at the US Air Force Test Pilot School.
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