A guidance at changing propulsion between vertical and horizontal

IEEE/AIAA, 29th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC), Hilton Salt Lake City Center Salt Lake City, Utah

Most advanced VTOL airplanes such as V-22, JSF-35, and AV-8 can change the directions of their propulsions from horizontal to vertical at landings, and also from vertical and horizontal after takeoffs. The maneuvers by a pilot of such a VTOL airplane at those changes seem to be difficult and rarely cause some accidents. The more prediction on the behaviors of the airplane including the trajectory and the attitude could be computed in real time and be displayed the result in the cockpit. This paper proposes a display system that displays the predictions on the behaviors with a virtual display on a personal computer. The graphic processors of embedding systems have become to have equivalent performance to the current personal computers. Therefore the prototype system proposed on this paper could be realized also in the most embedding systems using in the guidance. For the predictions, this system calculates a simple physical simulation and a simple hydrodynamic simulation. Comparing to the current situation where the avionics of the VTOL tells no prediction, the simple prediction computed by the guidance computer would much assist the pilot to make an instantaneous decision on the maneuver.