Design Specifications Development for Unmanned Aircraft Carrier Landings: A Simulation Approach

摘要

This project investigated the demands landing precision place upon the physical configurations of carrier-based unmanned aircraft, The goal was the determination of a minimum set of performance and maneuverability criteria that ensure satisfactory carrier landing precision and consistency. The first step was to design and write a comprehensive computer model to simulate unmanned carrier landings. The model included ship dynamics, atmospheric turbulence, navigational inaccuracies, dynamic airplane control structure, and aircraft dynamics. The airplane sensed and corrected for three disturbances: wind gusts, unsteady ship motion, and navigational information errors. The second step involved varying aircraft attributes and recording landing performance statistics for each configuration. The influence of each attribute was extracted from the landing statistics. This was done for various weather conditions because the ship motion increases with wave size and the gust intensity increases with average wind velocity. The third step was the development of preliminary design criteria to be refined and verified with test cases. The fourth and final step was to generate the final aircraft design limits. The longitudinal design limit is a lift curve slope of at least 2.9 per radian. No bound on instability or drag was indicated.