Total Envelope Modeling Application for Transport Aircraft

A key limiting factor in the development of transport class aircraft flight models capable of accurately modeling stall and post stall characteristics has been a lack of aerodynamic description, which has arisen due to the industry’s limited testing capability into the post stall region and the lack of requirements to model these behaviors. Reynolds number effects, which are relatively limited for thin airfoil fighter configurations, are much more pronounced for the thick airfoil transport configurations, and complicate the utilization of static and dynamic data in this region. With little or no validation data for these aircraft, application of the wind tunnel test data is historically problematic. This effort will establish a process for collecting and integrating wind tunnel data for use in a high fidelity flight models capable of providing representative flight behavior through stall and beyond for transport configurations. This effort will require the development of testing hardware and methods as well as Re correction methods to enable the direct integration of the collected data. This process will be demonstrated using the Navy’s P-8 aircraft as the demonstrator configuration.