Computer Aided Evaluation of Aircraft Handling Qualities

Abstract

Modern high performance aircraft are designed to be aerodynamically unstable and employ sophisticated digital flight control systems onboard to recover stability and meet the stringent performance requirements over the complete flight envelope. Performance evaluation and verification of these advanced flight control systems require an analytical comparison of system characteristics to various military specifications including handling quality specifications like the MIL-F-8785 and the recent MIL-STD-1797. These evaluations are becoming increasingly complex and difficult as the design trend towards increased control system integration, sophistication and coupling continues. This paper describes the salient features of the interactive computer aided software package developed for the analytical evaluation of handling qualities and generation of lower order equivalent system models for modern high performance aircraft. The software package is based on Mat lab/Fortran and runs on IBM compatible personal computers.