Rotorcraft Handling Qualities and Flight Control System Specification Personal Computer Tutorial and Data Base

With the growing acceptance of the new ADS-33C handling qualities specification, it is essential that flight test engineers and pilots be effectively trained in this new methodology as soon as possible. personal Computer (PC) based tutorials provide convenient and cost effective training aids, allowing students to learn at their own pace and schedule. Due to practical considerations of memory and mass storage, most PC-based tutorials must use canned scenarios that limit the scope of a student's interaction. Recent advances in network technology have allowed PC's to act as smart terminals and remotely share access tomemory, mass storage and CPU capacity of more powerful UNIX based computers and workstations. ART has developed FLIGHTLAB, a software tool for interactive design, simulation and analysis of rotorcraft that utilizes the computational power and X-window interface of UNIX base workstations. ART proposes to develop a PC-based tutorial on handling qualities and control system specification that provides extensive interactive access to FLIGHTLAB through a network connection to a UNIX workstation running FLIGHTLAB. This tutorial would utilize FLIGHTALAB's flight test planning and analysis interface and simulation capability to allow students to alter design configurations, conduct simulated flight tests on the design vehicle, and analyze the results. Those with direct access to the FLIGHTLAB workstation could then correlate the analysis with a piloted evaluation using FLIGHTLAB'S real time capability. The hands-on simulation experience will be augmented with access to flight test data down loaded to the FLIGHTLAB data base for access by the handling qualities utilities.