In-Flight Entertainment and Connectivity (IFEC) is becoming a key trend and offering in-flight connectivity is one of the most essential demands of commercial airline passengers. A grand challenge is to provide in-flight connectivity in high altitudes and particularly in isolated locations, such as the oceans, where establishing an air-to-ground link is not possible. Moreover, the high speed and dynamic characteristics of such aircraft make this task difficult. Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networking (AANET) intends to cope with this challenge by forming a network of airplanes having air-to-air (A2A) connections. However, the dynamic nature of such a network is likely to lead to unstable connections. The primary root cause of the majority of these stability issues is known to be the short life of A2A links which is the result of poor topology formation of aircraft. Concentrating on aircraft clustering and making them more stable can improve connection lifetime and improve the stability and performance of the network. Therefore the main objective in making AANETs feasible should be to form the topology as clusters of aircraft. With this in mind, the thesis's proposition is twofold: First, unveil the benefits of density-based clustering to improve the AANET performance. To do so, a modified DBSCAN algorithm is employed for the clustering problem that exploits several features of real flight datasets. This method also includes a weighted scheme to reflect the relative importance of each feature of the final calculation. The proposed method improved the packet delivery ratio and end-to-end latency of the state-of-the-art clustering-based AANET solutions by 51 % and 30 %, respectively. In addition, the proposed approach reduces the number of cluster changes by 22%. Second, selecting a well-connected cluster head is the next stage in enhancing connection and stability. This thesis presents a new cluster head selection technique for AANETs that calculates the Neighbor Nodes within a given distance of each node and selects the node with the most connections as the new cluster head. In instances where a cluster head cannot interact directly with another cluster, a Gateway node is chosen to facilitate connection with other clusters. According to simulations, the suggested method increases packet delivery ratio by 3, end-to-end delay by 9 and throughput by up to 10% compared to the current state of the art. In addition, the proposed method reduces cluster head replacements by 17% and increases cluster head longevity by 8%.

Inlight variable stability aircraft and inlight simulation are described. The uses of these vehicles and the associated requirements are described. Several forms of control architecture are identified for use in a T-6A inlight simulator. A non-linear model of the T-6A Texan II is developed for use in MATLAB/SIMULINK®. This model is used to design a feedforward responseeedback controller, based on simplified dynamic inversion. This controller is shown to exercise precise control over the T-6A host aircraft dynamics. This architecture is then used to demonstrate simulation of the A-4 and the F-15 by the T-6A. In addition to proving simplified dynamic inversion for inlight simulation, it is shown that the same configuration is useful in handling qualities training of military test pilots.

Individual tutoring has been successful in facilitating learning in domains such as LISP, physics, and algebra. These tasks are static in that problems do not change while the student is trying to solve them. Dynamic tasks such as flying, where the problem changes spontaneously over time, represent different challenges for tutors. To understand tutoring in dynamic tasks, we conducted a field observation of students being given messages by a flight instructor. Five low flight time student pilots were asked to perform nine instrument flight tasks while being tutored by an instructor pilot in both a virtual simulator flight and in a real airplane flight. The data from our study were compared to two prominent models of one-on-one tutoring. Only a small portion of the utterances made by the tutor or by the student matched previous accounts, suggesting that a new approach is needed to address tutoring during instrument flight instruction.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The field of computer graphics has continued to provide an efficient means of depicting information about complex phenomena for its users. It has become a widely used tool through which the user may manipulate data to generate a different perspective of the problem at hand and, hence, offers a solution to many varied problems. One area of the application for computer graphics is the field of flight simulation. At the University of Central Florida, research is being conducted in the area of computer graphics simulation to develop a method through which a pictorial representation of the outline of a small airport runway may be modified to appear as viewed by a pilot in a defined airspace. The purpose of this paper is to provide a means of interfacing a small computer to a flight simulator device as well as a graphics terminal. This new implementation of the software will allow a pictorial display to be continuously modified by the changing positional and attitudinal parameters provided from a flight simulator's input. Another goal of this paper is to generate faster display turnaround times by programming the computer in assembly language. Further, the hardware that accomplishes this task is discussed. Finally, suggestions for continued research in this area conclude the report.

The flight simulator display peripheral, described herein, provides the visual aide necessary for observation of effects due to operator responses for any aircraft simulator which prohibits the observers from occupying space within the cockpit of the simulator. This display peripheral is provided by a three-dimensional, computer-controlled, motor-driven model which duplicates the angular movements generated by the aircraft simulator by moving a model aircraft mounted within a clear plastic ball. The display utilizes a Motorola 68000 educational computer board to translate the three aircraft angles. pitch, yaw and roll received from the aircraft simulator via an RS-232C compatible serial asynchronous communication interface at a rate of three hertz, into signals used to drive the stepper motors, mounted in a fixed coordinate frame along the three principal axes, to simulate the aircraft orientation.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The number of aircraft parameters used in flight-testing has constantly increased over the years and there is no sign that situation will change in the near future. On the contrary, in modern, software-driven, digital avionic systems, all sorts of parameters circulate through digital buses and can be transferred to on-board data acquisition systems more easily than those converted from traditional analog transducers, facilitating the request for more and more parameters to be acquired, processed, visualized, stored and retrieved at any given time. The constant unbalance between what parameter quantity engineers believe to be “sufficient” for developing and troubleshooting systems in a new aircraft, which tends to grow with aircraft complexity, and the associated cost of instrumenting a test prototype accordingly, which tends to grow beyond budget limits, pushes for new creative ways of handling both tendencies without compromising the ease of performing an engineering analysis directly from flight test data. This paper presents an alternative for handling large collections of flight test parameters through a relational approach, particularly in two important scenarios: the very basic creation and administration of the traditional “Flight Test Parameter List” and the transmission of selected data over a telemetry link for visualization in a Ground Station.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Hypersonic test vehicles require extensive data acquisition in order to accurately determine and refine engine performance. The increasing speed of scramjet engines places new constraints on data manipulation and system control. A compact modular flight computer has been developed that has high speed analog data acquisition, a programmable high data rate PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) encoder, compact data storage, and high speed I/O (Input/Output) capabilities. Principle to the design is the thermal management required for space environments. A functional overview is presented together with a summary of the analog performance. The integration of future capability requirements is also discussed.