Development of a Wind Tunnel Apparatus for Aircraft Stability Augmentation System Testing

Wind tunnel testing can be used, to some extent, to validate computational methods applied to aircraft analysis. The costs associated with those tests are usually much less than with flight testing and with more flexible instrumentation settings. Aircraft automatic flight control systems can be developed and simulated using computational methods. Very often, though, computer simulations fail to reproduce real flight characteristics. This paper describes the first phase of development and testing of an apparatus designed to experimentally verify, in a wind tunnel, the functionality of aircraft stability augmentation systems (SAS). The objective of such testing is to aid in validating the methodologies used in the development and tuning of automatic flight control systems.

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