Innovative Technologies to Support Future Ship-based Flight Testing

Dean Carico, Rotary Wing Ship Suitability Branch NAVAIR Patuxent River, MD

Abstract

Several technology options related to math modeling and visual landing aids applications are being developed to support future helicopter/ship testing and related analysis. It is important to develop new database options to support both helicopter/ship testing and related analytic work.

A program was initiated in 2004 that focused on using available technology to integrate the various aircraft/ship database components and apply a variety of intelligent data acquisition and analysis tools. The goal was to use the new database to integrate all of the components of land and ship-based flight testing and make the information available to test team members using a web-based interface. The new database has provisions for storing aircraft static and dynamic data, ship motion and airwake data, related analytic model and wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics data, plus photographic, video, and audio data and it also has the ability to provide several search and data presentation options.

A variety of intelligent tools like neural networks and fuzzy logic, plus probability theory and data consistency checking are being employed to help team members better understand the data and identify potential data problems early in the test program. The rotorcraft math models, visual landing aids models, ship airwake models and motion models data, and intelligent database and analysis tools are innovative technologies that can be used to support and enhance future rotorcraft/ship flight testing.