Handling Qualities Specification Requirements for Maritime Rotorcraft, Vertical Takeoff/Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and Heavy Lift

ART proposes to develop a technical basis for augmenting the current ADS-33E-PRF to accommodate the needs of improving its applicability to shipboard rotorcraft and heavy lift helicopter flying qualities specifications. The research effort will emphasize the new criteria development, the evaluation methodology formulation, and the analytical simulation toolkit integration. The detailed Phase I objectives are to (1) accomplish a thorough review of the current ADS-33E-PRF and conduct a comprehensive investigation of existing flight test and simulation data to identify areas which need improvement; (2) investigate and evaluate land-and sea-based rotorcraft operational differences and propose new specification criteria for shipboard rotorcraft operations; (3) develop methods for simulation and/or flight test evaluation of the new specification criteria; (4) prototype a new handling qualities evaluation toolkit for shipboard rotorcraft operations that is compatible with industry standard simulation programs, such as FLIGHTLAB or MATLAB/Simulink; and (5) prototype the new toolkit by integrating it with FLIGHTLAB to demonstrate the functionality.