Inertial Scaling for Derisking Stability and Control of Tightly Coupled Aeropropulsive Aircraft Configurations

Whisper Aero has assembled one of the world’s top subscale aircraft teams, purpose-built to drive rapid innovation in dynamic scaling. Our mission is simple: deliver flight-validated insights earlier, at lower cost, to de-risk the development of unconventional aircraft.  The overall goal of leveraging sub-scale aircraft models is to decrease development time and cost, while identifying and mitigating risks early in development program. Inertially scaled models provide a particularly compelling opportunity to accurately assess performance early in unconventional aircraft development programs to address major risks such as unacceptable stability and control characteristics.   Significant advancements have taken place in recent years across additive manufacturing, computational fluid dynamics (particularly in complex aero-propulsive-control flows), high performance computing access (and cost), and micro-sizing of high-quality electronic components (servos, sensors, flight control systems). These advancements have a strong synergistic fit into the ability to fabricate dynamically scaled aircraft with well-matched moments of inertia for providing quality flight test data. By leveraging the prior experience of organizations such as NASA Langley—which has led the way in the investigation and application of dynamic scaling through programs like AirSTAR—with these new fabrication processes, technologies, and toolsets, we are now uniquely positioned to explore high disciplinary convergence across novel aircraft concepts with potential for transformative improvements in performance. One notable area of advancement across aviation markets is the tight coupling of aerodynamics, propulsion, control, and acoustics, which results in highly complex, cross-disciplinary designs that transcend current aircraft capabilities.   As technological progress accelerates, and with adversaries also rapidly adopting and exploiting these emerging technologies, timely innovation is more critical than ever. In this environment, the ability to scout capability frontiers quickly and cost-effectively through sub-scale testing allows us to move at the speed required to stay ahead. However, validating that dynamically scaled flight test data can reliably predict full-scale performance remains the essential step for ensuring research investments are well placed. Whisper Aero’s team is committed to delivering that proof, by executing a rigorous, technically credible dynamic scaling campaign for DARPA ISaAc.