Test Planning and Support
Flight testing is the culmination of months and often years of analysis and design work. It is an exciting time when a new aircraft or modification is finally flown and data is collected to measure against predictions and analyses. If the required work was performed to mitigate major risks there is a good chance of the project’s success. Even still, there are often a few items which require developmental work and troubleshooting.
Optimum Aerodynamics has experience in developmental and certification flight testing. Specific experience is focused on handling qualities, performance, and static position error testing. Some of our experience includes:
- Instrumentation Requirements
- Test Plan Development
- Undesireable Characteristic Troubleshooting
- Stall characteristics
- Control forces
- Flight Test Data Plotting (see below)
- Regulatory Compliance Evaluation
Flight Test Data — Time History Trace (axis removed)
Data Reduction
After collecting flight test data it must be evaluated based on the pass / fail criteria of the test procedure or further reduced to characterize the aircraft performance. For handling qualities testing, cross-plots of critical parameters are often used to show a relationship between control input and aircraft response. Performance test points are reduced into dimensional drag values using propulsion models and then non-dimensionalized to develop a drag polar which can be used for data expansion.
Optimum Aero has experience with handling qualities and performance data reduction and can help to develop reports used for Type Inspection Authorization (TIA) or a final Type Inspection Report (TIR).