A number of challenges in the development and application of flying qualities criteria for modern aircraft are addressed in this dissertation. The history of flying qualities is traced from its origins to modern day techniques as applied to piloted aircraft. Included in this historical review is the case that was made for the development of flying qualities criteria in the 1940's and 1950's when piloted aircraft became prevalent in the United States military. It is then argued that UAVs today are in the same context historically as piloted aircraft when flying qualities criteria were first developed. To aid in development of a flying qualities criterion for UAVs, a relevant classification system for UAVs. Two longitudinal flying qualities criteria are developed for application to autonomous UAVs. These criteria center on mission performance of the integrated aircraft and sensor system. The first criterion is based on a sensor platform's ability to reject aircraft disturbances in pitch attitude. The second criterion makes use of energy methods to create a metric to quantify the transmission of turbulence to the sensor platform. These criteria are evaluated with airframe models of different classes of air vehicles using the CASTLE 6 DOF simulation. Another topic in flying qualities is the evaluation of nonlinear control systems in piloted aircraft. A L1 adaptive controller was implemented and tested in a motion based, piloted flight simulator. This is the first time that the L1 controller has been evaluated for piloted handling qualities. Results showed that the adaptive controller was able to recover good flying qualities from a degraded aircraft. The final topic addresses a less direct, but extremely important challenge for flying qualities research and education: a capstone course in flight mechanics teaching flight test techniques and featuring a motion based flight simulator was implemented and evaluated. The course used a mixture of problem based learning and role based learning to create an environment where students could explore key flight mechanics concepts. Evaluation of the course's effectiveness to promote the understanding of key flight mechanics concepts is presented. / Ph. D.

The notion of airplane stability and control being a balancing act between stability and control has been around as long as aeronautics. The Wright brothers’ first successful flights were born of the debate, and were successful at least in part because they spent considerable time teaching themselves how to control their otherwise unstable airplane. This thesis covers four aspects of handling for large transport aircraft: large size and the accompanying low frequency dynamics, the way in which lifting surfaces and control system elements are modelled in flight dynamics analyses, the cockpit feel characteristics and details of how pilots interact with them, and the dynamic instability associated with Pilot Induced Oscillations. The dynamics associated with large transport aircraft are reviewed from the perspective of pilot-in-the-loop handling qualities, including the effects of relaxing static stability in pursuit of performance. Areas in which current design requirements are incomplete are highlighted. Issues with modelling of dynamic elements which are between the pilot’s fingers and the airplane response are illuminated and recommendations are made. Cockpit feel characteristics are examined in detail, in particular, the nonlinear elements of friction and breakout forces. Three piloted simulation experiments are described and the results reviewed. Each was very different in nature, and all were designed to evaluate linear and nonlinear elements of the cockpit feel characteristics from the pilot’s point of view. These included understanding the pilot’s ability to precisely control the manipulator itself, the pilot’s ability to command the flight path, and neuro-muscular modelling to gain a deeper understanding of the range of characteristics pilots can adapt to and why. Based on the data collected and analyzed, conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made. Finally, a novel and unique PIO prediction criterion is developed, which is based on control-theoretic constructs. This criterion identifies unique signatures in the dynamic response of the airplane to predict the onset of instability.

When developing an aircraft, one of several important aspects is to predict and properly design the dynamic behaviour of the aircraft. This holds for manned aircraft as well as for UAVs. The optimal dynamic behaviour for an aircraft depends on the mission or purpose: for a certain use an aircraft should be agile, other may require a more stable one. In aeronautics, the properties that describe the aircraft ecacy with respect to some task are known as ying qualities, and our goal is to study their dependence on some design parameters. As a test model we use an existing UAV. After deriving its 6-DOF dynamic model and assessing its baseline characteristics, we perform parametric studies. The strategy followed is divided in two steps: the rst consists on analyzing ying qualities sensitivity to changes in model parameters. The second step studies how specific design changes affect model parameters. Because the rst step only depends on the dynamic model form, we verify, by testing two other dierent aircrafts, that conclusions drawn from this step are valid to other congurations. Finally we show how results from parametric studies can be used to improve the UAV ying qualities regarding a certain mission, through the introduction of slight modications on baseline design.

This paper presents a flying qualities built-in-test for UAS application with the scope limited to the longitudinal axis. A doublet input waveform excites the AV and both α and q are used by EUDKF to estimate the A and B matrices which are short period approximations of the system. ζ, ω, GM, PM, observability, and controllability are calculated to determine flying qualities with the results displayed to the AVO in a color-coded, easy to interpret display. While SID algorithms have been flying in vehicles with adaptive control schemes, vehicles with other schemes (such as classical feedback) lack this built-in self assessment tool. In addition, adaptive control SID results are not analyzed and displayed but instead used internally. This work intends to extend this self-assessment option to all UASs regardless of control scheme as a “plug-and-play” add-on by building a reliable and robust tool that requires little tuning.

The notion of airplane stability and control being a balancing act between stability and control has been around as long as aeronautics. The Wright brothers’ first successful flights were born of the debate, and were successful at least in part because they spent considerable time teaching themselves how to control their otherwise unstable airplane. This thesis covers four aspects of handling for large transport aircraft: large size and the accompanying low frequency dynamics, the way in which lifting surfaces and control system elements are modelled in flight dynamics analyses, the cockpit feel characteristics and details of how pilots interact with them, and the dynamic instability associated with Pilot Induced Oscillations. The dynamics associated with large transport aircraft are reviewed from the perspective of pilot-in-the-loop handling qualities, including the effects of relaxing static stability in pursuit of performance. Areas in which current design requirements are incomplete are highlighted. Issues with modelling of dynamic elements which are between the pilot’s fingers and the airplane response are illuminated and recommendations are made. Cockpit feel characteristics are examined in detail, in particular, the nonlinear elements of friction and breakout forces. Three piloted simulation experiments are described and the results reviewed. Each was very different in nature, and all were designed to evaluate linear and nonlinear elements of the cockpit feel characteristics from the pilot’s point of view. These included understanding the pilot’s ability to precisely control the manipulator itself, the pilot’s ability to command the flight path, and neuro-muscular modelling to gain a deeper understanding of the range of characteristics pilots can adapt to and why. Based on the data collected and analyzed, conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made. Finally, a novel and unique PIO prediction criterion is developed, which is based on control-theoretic constructs. This criterion identifies unique signatures in the dynamic response of the airplane to predict the onset of instability.

A modern ghter aircraft has an advanced ight control system which highly augmentsthe control inputs from the pilot. To verify a new iteration of the control system is a timeconsuming and expensive task. It is desired to nd qualities that is not satisfactory to thepilot as early as possible in the verication process to reduce the cost for design changes.The primary objective of this thesis is to develop methods that can be used for automaticalevaluation of aircraft ying qualities from the data provided by a desktop simulator. A desktopsimulator is cheap to use compared to ight tests and tests with a pilot in a simulator.Only ghter aircraft in the precision ight phase are studied however the methods developedcould easily be extended to include other types of aircraft and other phases of ight.To evaluate the ying qualities two sets of criteria are used the MIL-F-8785C standardand the Gibson criteria. The MIL-F-8785C standard uses a second order linear system toevaluate the aircraft's ying qualities. The linear system is estimated from the nonlineardata and evaluated against the MIL-F-8785C standard. The Gibson criteria studies the timeand frequency domain directly and are designed to work with highly augmented aircraft.The set of Gibson criteria used in this thesis primary evaluates data from the time domainhowever one criterion from the frequency domain is studied.The methods developed to evaluate the ying qualities from the MIL-F-8785C standardonly works for a small part of the ight envelope furthermore they show a large dierencefor what is considered acceptable ying qualities. Because of this the methods developed forthe MIL-F-8785C standard are considered not to be suited for evaluating ying qualities forhighly augmented aircraft. The methods developed to evaluate the ying qualities againstthe Gibson criteria works for a large part of the ight and also show a high accuracy. Thismakes the methods suited for evaluation of the ying qualities.

The primary objective of this thesis is to evaluate the prospect of machine learning methods being used to classify flying qualities based on simulator data (with the focus being on pitch maneuvers). If critical flying qualities could be identified earlier in the verification process, they can be further invested in and focused on with less cost for design changes of the flight control system. Information from manned simulations with given flying quality levels are used to create a replication of the performed pitch maneuver in a desktop simulator. The generated flight data is represented by different measures in the classification to separately train and test the machine learning models against the given flying quality level. The models used are Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines with radial basis functions (RBF), linear and polynomial kernels along with Artificial Neural Networks.  The results show that the classifiers correctly identify at least 80% of cases with critical flying qualities. The classification shows that the statistical measures of the time signals and first order time derivatives of pitch, roll and yaw rates are enough for classification within the scope of this thesis. The different machine learning models show no significant difference in performance in the scope of this thesis. In conclusion, machine learning methods show good potential for classification of flying qualities, and could become an important tool for evaluating flying qualities of large amounts of simulations, in addition to manned simulations. / Huvuduppgiften med detta examensarbete är att utvärdera huruvida maskininlärning kan användas för att klassificera flygkvaliteter från simulatordata (där fokus ligger på att utvärdera tippmanövrar). Om kritiska flygkvaliteter kan identifieras tidigare i verifikationsprocessen, kan resurser fokuseras för att åtgärda problemet tidigt med mindre kostnader för ändringar av styrsystemet. Information från bemannade simuleringar där flygkvalitetsnivåer har angetts av pilot används för att återskapa tippmanövern i skrivbordssimulatorn. Den genererade flygdatan representeras av olika mått i klassificeringen för att separat träna och testa maskininlärningsmodellerna mot den givna flygkvalitetsnivån. De modeller som används i rapporten är logistisk regression, stödvektormaskiner med radiella basfunktioner (RBF), linjär och polynomisk kärna samt artificiella neurala nätverk. Resultaten visar att klassificerarna korrekt identifierar över 80% av fallen med kritiska flygkvaliteter. Klassificeringen visar att statistiska mått av tidssignalen och första ordningens tidsderivator i tipp, roll och gir är tillräckligt för klassificering inom gränserna av detta examensarbete. De olika maskininlärningsmodellerna visar inga signifikanta skillnader i prestanda med datan som används. Sammanfattningsvis kan maskininlärningsmodellerna anses ha god potential för klassificering av flygkvaliteter, och kan vara ett viktigt verktyg för att klassificera flygkvaliteter för stora mängder flygdata, som komplement till bemannade simuleringar.

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine de l’automatique, et a pour but de fournir des outils utiles à l’atterrissage en mer d’hélicoptères (sur navire ou plateforme) et employés dans le cadre d’un potentiel pilotage automatique. L’objectif a donc été de développer une série de lois de commande pilotées manuellement, puis commandées de façon autonome à l’aide d’informations caméra. Les lois ainsi développées à l’aide de modèles dynamiques d’hélicoptères, limitations mécaniques incluses, se basent sur les critères de Qualité de Vol issus de la norme ADS-33. L’ensemble a fait appel à une approche anti-windup pour améliorer la robustesse face aux situations d’actionneurs en saturation. Enfin les lois issues de ces travaux ont été testées en temps-réel sur le banc de pilotage d’hélicoptères de l’ONERA Salon-de-Provence. / This thesis is related to the automatic & control engineering field, and itsmain goal is to provide useful tools for ship landing missions, tools that can be used fora potential autopilot. The objective has been to develop a series of control laws manuallypiloted, then automatically controlled by visual servoing using identified image features. Thelaws developped thanks to helicopter models with mechanical limitations were based on flyingqualities criteria from the ADS-33 standard. The process also defines an anti-windup approachto cope with actuator saturations. Finally the main results were assessed in real time withthe ONERA rotorcraft flight test bench at ONERA Salon-de-Provence.

General aircraft dynamic stability theory was used to predict the natural frequencies, damping ratios and time constants of the dynamic modes for three specific small UAVs with wingspans on the scale from 0.6 meters to 1.2 meters. Using USAF DatCom methods, a spreadsheet program for predicting the dynamic stability and handling qualities of small UAVs was created for use in the design stage of new small UAV concept development. This program was verified by inputting data for a Cessna-182, and by then comparing the program output with that of a similar program developed by DAR Corporation. Predictions with acceptable errors were made for all of the dynamic modes except for the spiral mode. The design tool was also used to verify and develop dynamic stability and handling qualities design guidelines for small UAV designers. Using this design tool, it was observed that small UAVs tend to exhibit higher natural frequencies of oscillation for all of the dynamic modes. Comparing the program outputs with military handling qualities specifications, the small UAVs at standard configurations fell outside the range of acceptable handling qualities for short-period mode natural frequency, even though multiple test pilots rated the flying qualities as acceptable. Using dynamic scaling methods to adjust the current military standards for the short period mode, a new scale was proposed specifically for small UAVs. This scale was verified by conducting flight tests of three small UAVs at various configurations until poor handling qualities were observed. These transitions were observed to occur at approximately the boundary predicted by the new, adjusted scale.

Um método para avaliação do uso de ganho adequado em ensaios de verificação de PIO (Pilot Induced Oscillations) é apresentado. As tarefas de manobra sintética (Synthetic Tracking Task) são utilizadas para demonstração. A teoria é baseada no conceito de entropia estatística proveniente da teoria da informação e no modelo estrutural do piloto humano. O método é apresentado para manobras executadas no eixo lateral e oferece uma medida do ganho humano utilizado durante a sua execução em malha-fechada. Para a modelagem da planta é utilizado modelo black-box com equacionamento de espaço de estados e identificação de parâmetros. Dados de ensaios em voo provenientes de uma aeronave de transporte certificada FAR-25 são utilizados para medir a razão entre o tempo gasto pelo piloto humano em uma malha fechada em posição versus o tempo em uma malha de derivada da posição (roll vs. roll rate). Esta medida é proposta como validadora da execução correta do ensaio. / A method is proposed to verify losed-loop adequate flight test piloting gain in PIO aircraft certification. The synthetic tracking task PIO flight test is used. The theory is based on the entropy concept from information theory and on the structural pilot model of the human pilot. The method is presented for single axis pilot tracking maneuvers and offers a measure of the human pilot gain employed during its execution. A black-box, state-space, parameter-identified model is used for the plant. Flight test data from a FAR-25 transport aircraft is used to verify the theory of how to determine a measure of the ratio between time spent by the human pilot in the error loop versus in the error rate loop to control the aircraft. This measure is proposed as a test point validation method for PIO flight testing.