A New Flight Test Technique for Pilot Model Identification

Abstract

For today’s highly augmented fighter aircraft, the aircraft dynamics are specifically tailored to provide Level 1 handling qualities over a wide regime of the service flight envelope. This requires a profound understanding of the human pilot to assure that stability margins of the airframe plus controller dynamics are sufficient to accommodate the additional pilot dynamics introduced into the system during closed loop tasks. Whereas the mathematical formulations of the airframe and controller dynamics are reasonably exact, the human pilot remains to be the most unpredictable element in the Pilot Vehicle System. In the past decades various pilot models have been developed in conjunction with analytical handling qualities and Pilot Involved Oscillations prediction criteria, mainly focusing on air-to-air tracking tasks. This paper focuses on the development of a novel flight test technique, which allows the identification of the pilot dynamics during air-to-surface aiming tasks. During an extensive flight test campaign, data was gathered and processed, using state of the art systemidentification techniques to derive a mathematical model of the human pilot during air-tosurface tracking tasks. Flight test and model-based data are compared with each other to support the validity of the developed pilot models.