Approaches to aircraft flight tests at high angles of attack

Abstract

Evaluation of aircraft characteristics at high angles of attack is one of the most important tasks when testing highly maneuverable aircraft. The paper presents a new methodology for flight tests of aircraft at high angles of attack based on information and computer technologies. The key points are the flight experiment design, the identification of aerodynamic coefficients at super-critical angles of attack, the use of mathematic models for the phenomena of aerodynamic hysteresis. Practical results in the field of testing aircraft at high and super-critical angles of attack are presented.