Stability and Control Flight Testing of a Half-Scale Pioneer Remotely PilotedVehicle

摘要

Stability and control flight testing was conducted on a half-scale Pioneerremotely piloted vehicle. The aircraft was instrumented with sensors to measure flight control deflections, angle of attack, side slip angle, and airspeed. A developmental telemetry transmitter was installed to send the information to a ground based receiver where it was recorded for computer processing. Flight tests were conducted to characterize longitudinal static stability by varying the center of gravity to determine the neutral point. directional static stability was characterized using steady heading side slip flight tests. The telemetry system's performance was acceptable and the directional stability data correlated favorably with data gathered from wind tunnel testing and computational methods. Longitudinal stability was more difficult to characterize due to limitations of elevator deflection resolution and the amount of data gathered. Additional flight testing will be conducted to tune the telemetry system with the data collection sensors, and to increase the Pioneer static stability data base.