Abstract
In the early years of aviation, spins were poorly understood and frequently fatal. With just over a century of research and experiments dedicated to spins, today’s aviation world has a very firm grasp on spin aerodynamics. Most fighter aircraft have airframes and control surfaces specifically designed to ensure the ability of departure from the possible spin modes the aircraft can enter. An alternative and/or additional approach is given by thrust vectoring. Implementing thrust vectoring into spin recovery can potentially save an aircraft and/or the life of the pilot in situation where control-surface-only spin recovery is not able to recover the aircraft due to non-adequate recovery time and/or altitude restrictions. This work investigates the efficacy of implementing thrust vectoring alongside the control surfaces into spin recovery on the NASA F-18 HARV. A total of 396 different thrust vectoring configurations were tested by applying them on a single, leftward flat spin mode that was attainable by the NASA F-18 HARV. The thrust vectoring configurations are defined by three variables: specific vanes deflected, the magnitude of vane deflections, and the throttle deflection. These spin recovery trials were evaluated by two main criteria, time of recovery and loss of altitude during recovery. The overall results have shown that implementing thrust vectoring along with the control surfaces into spin recovery greatly decrease both the recovery time and the loss of altitude during recovery.
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