Download or read book Understanding Performance Flight Testing Kitplanes and Production Aircraft written by Hubert C. Smith and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2001-09-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Covers lightplane performance flight testing methods, measures, and computer applications *Includes CD-ROM with sample spreadsheets containing equations to help readers perform their own flight tests *Describes GPS (Global Positioning System) test method for airspeed calibration and rapid-wind camera method for takeoff performance

Download or read book Operational Aircraft Performance and Flight Test Practices written by Mario Asselin and published by American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Incorporated. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serves as a single source reference, from the basic theory to practical cases, for certification flight testing and operational performance monitoring. The book provides more real-life examples than are offered in traditional textbooks.

Download or read book The Flight Testing of Production Aircraft written by John Anthony Crosby Warren and published by . This book was released on 1943 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giver en samlet oversigt og beskrivelse af funktioner, flybetjeningssystemer, flyveegenskaber m.m. som det er vigtigt at have viden om som testpilot

Download or read book Flight Testing of Fixed Wing Aircraft written by Ralph D. Kimberlin and published by AIAA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation The measurement of performance during an airplane's flight, testing is one of the more important tasks to be accomplished during its development as it impacts on both the airplane's safety and its marketability. This book discusses performance for both propeller-driven and jet aircraft.

Download or read book Safety is No Accident From V Bombers to Concorde written by John R W Smith and published by Air World. This book was released on 2020-07-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flying, as everyone knows, is generally regarded as the safest means of transportation. Yet for that to be the case an enormous amount of testing is undertaken. Central to this, of course, are the test pilots, who fly the aircraft, but it is the men behind the scenes who deal with the technical aspects of the aircraft – the flight test observers and engineers. Numerous books have been written by Test Pilots, but few, if any, from the perspective of an Aeronautical Engineer working as Flight Test Observer/Engineer in partnership with the Test Pilot. This book is an account of the author’s flight-testing career, from the 1960s to early 1980s, at Avro and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). During the author’s time at Avro, he flew on the development and certification test flights of the Avro 748, 748MF, Shackletons, Nimrod and Handley-Page Victor tanker. In the CAA, his role turned to regulation, making flight test assessments of manufacturer’s prototypes and production aircraft, to check compliance with the CAA’s flight safety requirements. The scope ranged from single-engine light aircraft to large civil transport aircraft. It involved frequent visits to foreign manufacturers and also included his participation in the CAA’s Concorde certification flight test programme. Flight testing involves risk. Advancements in the understanding of aerodynamics and an increasingly professional approach to risk management improved safety, but it would never be risk-free. Several of the author’s close friends and colleagues died in flight test accidents during this period of rapid aeronautical development; all on civil aircraft types. It is because of such people that the millions of flights undertaken each year are trouble-free.

Download or read book On Subscale Flight Testing written by Alejandro Sobron and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downscaled physical models, also referred to as subscale models, have played an essential role in the investigation of the complex physics of flight until the recent disruption of numerical simulation. Despite the fact that improvements in computational methods are slowly pushing experimental techniques towards a secondary role as verification or calibration tools, real-world testing of physical prototypes still provides an unmatched confidence. Physical models are very effective at revealing issues that are sometimes not correctly identified in the virtual domain, and hence can be a valuable complement to other design tools. But traditional wind-tunnel testing cannot always meet all of the requirements of modern aeronautical research and development. It is nowadays too expensive to use these scarce facilities to explore different design iterations during the initial stages of aircraft development, or to experiment with new and immature technologies. Testing of free-flight subscale models, referred to as Subscale Flight Testing (SFT), could offer an affordable and low-risk alternative for complementing conventional techniques with both qualitative and quantitative information. The miniaturisation of mechatronic systems, the advances in rapid-prototyping techniques and power storage, as well as new manufacturing methods, currently enable the development of sophisticated test objects at scales that were impractical some decades ago. Moreover, the recent boom in the commercial drone industry has driven a quick development of specialised electronics and sensors, which offer nowadays surprising capabilities at competitive prices. These recent technological disruptions have significantly altered the cost-benefit function of SFT and it is necessary to re-evaluate its potential in the contemporary aircraft development context. This thesis aims to increase the comprehension and knowledge of the SFT method in order to define a practical framework for its use in aircraft design; focusing on low-cost, short-time solutions that don’t require more than a small organization and few resources. This objective is approached from a theoretical point of view by means of an analysis of the physical and practical limitations of the scaling laws; and from an empirical point of view by means of field experiments aimed at identifying practical needs for equipment, methods, and tools. A low-cost data acquisition system is developed and tested; a novel method for semi-automated flight testing in small airspaces is proposed; a set of tools for analysis and visualisation of flight data is presented; and it is also demonstrated that it is possible to explore and demonstrate new technology using SFT with a very limited amount of economic and human resources. All these, together with a theoretical review and contextualisation, contribute to increasing the comprehension and knowledge of the SFT method in general, and its potential applications in aircraft conceptual design in particular.

Download or read book Introduction to Aircraft Flight Test Engineering written by Hubert C. Smith and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Flight Testing of Aircraft written by and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On the Edge of Flight written by Eric William Absolon and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of Eric William Absolon, a relentlessly enthusiastic Aviation champion, whose lifelong love of aircraft has never wavered throughout his long and varied career. From boyhood fascination to the adult realization of his ambitions, this first-hand account takes in some of the key events of the dynamic period of twentieth century history which the author lived and worked through. Working his way up the ranks of the Gloster Aircraft Company, Absolon was able to see all the component processes of Aircraft production. The insight he provides into the inner workings of this busting center of Twentieth Century Aircraft production is unparalleled in modern accounts. Anyone with a fascination for the secret life of Aircraft is in for a treat here as the author relays his working experiences at the creative hub of the industry. His experiences including involvement with the post-war Drop testing of Meteor aircraft, working closely with these infamous vehicles of war in his role as Chief of Engineering Research, as well as an involvement with the more commercial side of Aviation production, a division within Gloster for which he served as Manager. This narrative charts his career with Gloster as well as a series of other companies who invited Absolon to offer his services. It also relays the story of the implementation and development of his own Aviation production business, Aljac Engineering Ltd. His expertise was highly prized then, and is now applied in the translation of experience into engaging prose, set to appeal to all genre enthusiasts.

Download or read book Flight Test System Identification written by Roger Larsson and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the demand for more advanced fighter aircraft, relying on unstable flight mechanical characteristics to gain flight performance, more focus has been put on model-based system engineering to help with the design work. The flight control system design is one important part that relies on this modeling. Therefore, it has become more important to develop flight mechanical models that are highly accurate in the whole flight envelope. For today’s modern fighter aircraft, the basic flight mechanical characteristics change between linear and nonlinear as well as stable and unstable as an effect of the desired capability of advanced maneuvering at subsonic, transonic and supersonic speeds. This thesis combines the subject of system identification, which is the art of building mathematical models of dynamical systems based on measurements, with aeronautical engineering in order to find methods for identifying flight mechanical characteristics. Here, some challenging aeronautical identification problems, estimating model parameters from flight-testing, are treated. Two aspects are considered. The first is online identification during flight-testing with the intent to aid the engineers in the analysis process when looking at the flight mechanical characteristics. This will also ensure that enough information is available in the resulting test data for post-flight analysis. Here, a frequency domain method is used. An existing method has been developed further by including an Instrumental Variable approach to take care of noisy data including atmospheric turbulence and by a sensor-fusion step to handle varying excitation during an experiment. The method treats linear systems that can be both stable and unstable working under feedback control. An experiment has been performed on a radio-controlled demonstrator aircraft. For this, multisine input signals have been designed and the results show that it is possible to perform more time-efficient flight-testing compared with standard input signals. The other aspect is post-flight identification of nonlinear characteristics. Here the properties of a parameterized observer approach, using a prediction-error method, are investigated. This approach is compared with four other methods for some test cases. It is shown that this parameterized observer approach is the most robust one with respect to noise disturbances and initial offsets. Another attractive property is that no user parameters have to be tuned by the engineers in order to get the best performance. All methods in this thesis have been validated on simulated data where the system is known, and have also been tested on real flight test data. Both of the investigated approaches show promising results.

Download or read book U S Supersonic Commercial Aircraft written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1997-08-25 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is currently developing advanced technologies to form the foundation for the next breakthrough in civil aviation: an economically viable, environmentally acceptable supersonic transport. NASA's High Speed Research Program works in conjunction with industry to identify and address critical technological challenges to initiating commercial development of a practical supersonic transport. The key technical areas investigated are engine emissions, fuel efficiency, service life, and weight; community noise; aircraft range and payload; and weight and service life of airframe structures. Areas of particular interest include the ability of technologies under development to meet program goals related to noise, emissions, service life, weight, range, and payload. This book examines aircraft design requirements, assesses the program's planning and progress, and recommends changes that will help the program achieve its overall objectives.

Download or read book Tactical Aircraft written by United States. General Accounting Office and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Flying beyond the stall written by Douglas A. Joyce and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The X-31 Enhanced Fighter Maneuverability Demonstrator was unique among experimental aircraft. A joint effort of the United States and Germany, the X-31 was the only X-plane to be designed, manufactured, and flight tested as an international collaboration. It was also the only X-plane to support two separate test programs conducted years apart, one administered largely by NASA and the other by the U.S. Navy, as well as the first X-plane ever to perform at the Paris Air Show. Flying Beyond the Stall begins by describing the government agencies and private-sector industries involved in the X-31 program, the genesis of the supermaneuverability concept and its initial design breakthroughs, design and fabrication of two test airframes, preparation for the X-31's first flight, and the first flights of Ship #1 and Ship #2. Subsequent chapters discuss envelope expansion, handling qualities (especially at high angles of attack), and flight with vectored thrust. The book then turns to the program's move to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and actual flight test data. Additional tasking, such as helmet-mounted display evaluations, handling quality studies, aerodynamic parameter estimation, and a "tailless" study are also discussed.The book describes how, in the aftermath of a disastrous accident with Ship #1 in 1995, Ship #2 was prepared for its outstanding participation in the Paris Air Show. The aircraft was then shipped back to Edwards AFB and put into storage until the late 1990s, when it was refurbished for participation in the U. S. Navy's VECTOR program. The book ends with a comprehensive discussion of lessons learned and includes an Appendix containing detailed information.

Download or read book Amateur Built Aircraft and Ultralight Flight Testing Handbook written by U. S. Department of Transportation and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This advisory circular (AC) sets forth suggestions and safety related recommendations to assist amateur and ultralight builders in developing individualized aircraft flight test plans. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), and the United States Ultralight Association (USUA) are concerned and committed to improving the safety record of amateur-built and ultralight aircraft. The FAA Administrator, T. Allen McArtor, and EAA President, Paul H. Poberezny, signed a Memorandum of Agreement on August 1, 1988, which addressed the need for educational and safety programs to assist amateur-builders in test flying their aircraft. In accordance with that agreement, this AC provides guidelines for flight testing amateur built aircraft. As part of the FAA's continuing efforts to improve the safety record of all types of general aviation aircraft, this AC has been revised to include flight testing recommendations for canard-type and ultralight aircraft. This AC's purpose is the following: (1) To make amateur-built/ultralight aircraft pilots aware that test flying an aircraft is a critical undertaking, which should be approached with thorough planning, skill, and common sense. (2) To provide recommendations and suggestions that can be combined with other sources on test flying (e.g., the aircraft plan/kit manufacturer's flight testing instructions, other flight testing data). This will assist the amateur/ultralight owner to develop a detailed flight test plan, tailored for their aircraft and resources. The flight test plan is the heart of all professional flight testing. The plan should account for every hour spent in the flight test phase and should be adhered to with the same respect for the unknown that all successful test pilots share. The time allotted for each phase of a personalized flight test plan may vary, and each phase may have more events or checks than suggested in this AC. The goals, however, should be the same. The two goals for an amateur builder/ ultralight owner should be as follows: (1) At the end of the aircraft's flight test phase, the aircraft will have been adequately tested and found airworthy and safe to operate within its established operational envelope. (2) Incorporation of the flight test operational and performance data into the aircraft's flight manual so the pilot can reference the data prior to each flight.

Download or read book Flight Testing of Aircraft written by and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 762 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Breaking the Mishap Chain written by Peter W. Merlin and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of case studies of mishaps involving experimental aircraft, aerospace vehicles, and spacecraft in which human factors played a significant role. In all cases the engineers involved, the leaders and managers, and the operators (i.e., pilots and astronauts) were supremely qualified and by all accounts superior performers. Such accidents and incidents rarely resulted from a single cause but were the outcome of a chain of events in which altering at least one element might have prevented disaster. As such, this work is most certainly not an anthology of blame. It is offered as a learning tool so that future organizations, programs, and projects may not be destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. These lessons were learned at high material and personal costs and should not be lost to the pages of history.

Download or read book German Secret Flight Test Centres to 1945 written by Heinrich Beauvais and published by Ian Allan Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major piece of research by a group of German authors, some of whom were involved at the time, into the establishment and activities of government flight-test centres in Germany from the resumption of flight testing in the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Their work will be of outstanding interest to students of the Second World War and the Luftwaffe. The authors begin with the secret testing in co-operation with the Red Army in the 1920/30s. The book deals with the major locations where testing was conducted including Johannisthal, Lipetsk, Rechlin, Travemunde, Tarnewitz and Peenemunde-West. Other less well known locations including early experimentation at Doberitz and Danzig are also covered. The book draws on an extensive collection of photographs and documents, many taken from hitherto unpublished sources. There are also comprehensive listings of the aircraft used, with such details as Werknummern, markings and engines. There are similarly detailed lists of personnel and the various research and test units.There is still enormous interest in the Luftwaffe and especially in the experimental aircraft which were produced and tested in Germany during the period of the Third Reich. This book will appeal directly to this market and achieve the same success of other Midland titles dealing with this area of aviation history.