Evaluating Landing Tools to Support Manned or Unmanned Helicopter/Ship Interface Testing and Operations

摘要

As developed in the article, successful shipboard recovery of a manned or unmanned air vehicle is a function of the operator’s ability to manipulate helicopter flying qualities, deal with the ship airwake and associated turbulence, ship motion, ship visual landing aids, and shipboard obstructions. Of the number of tools used to launch or recovery the air vehicle, there are no visual landing aids (VLA) on USN surface combatant ships to aid the operator in anticipating a ship flight deck quiescent period. The Landing Period Designator (LPD) was designed to provide ship motion cues to the operator to assist him/her in anticipating ship deck quiescent periods that result in acceptable conditions for a shipboard landing. An analytic evaluation of the LPD concept was conducted at the NAVAIR Manned Flight Simulator (MFS) as a build-up prior to at-sea. The NAVAIR MFS LPD data were compared to similar data from a Royal Navy Air Station Culdrose UK simulation conducted using similar analytic ship motion conditions. This paper reviews the manned flight simulation evaluations of the analytic landing period designator.