Advanced Flight Dynamics with Elements of Flight Control

Book excerpt: Advanced Flight Dynamics aim to integrate the subjects of aircraft performance, trim and stability/control in a seamless manner. Advanced Flight Dynamics highlights three key and unique viewpoints. Firstly, it follows the revised and corrected aerodynamic modeling presented previously in recent textbook on Elementary Flight Dynamics. Secondly, it uses bifurcation and continuation theory, especially the Extended Bifurcation Analysis (EBA) procedure devised by the authors, to blend the subjects of aircraft performance, trim and stability, and flight control into a unified whole. Thirdly, rather than select one control design tool or another, it uses the generalized Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) methodology to illustrate the fundamental principles of flight control. Advanced Flight Dynamics covers all the standard airplane maneuvers, various types of instabilities normally encountered in flight dynamics and illustrates them with real-life airplane data and examples, thus bridging the gap between the teaching of flight dynamics/ control theory in the university and its practice in airplane design bureaus. The expected reader group for this book would ideally be senior undergraduate and graduate students, practicing aerospace/flight simulation engineers/scientists from industry as well as researchers in various organizations. Key Features: Focus on unified nonlinear approach, with nonlinear analysis tools. Provides an up-to-date, corrected, and unified presentation of aircraft trim, stability and control analysis including nonlinear phenomena and closed-loop stability analysis. Contains a computational tool and real-life example carried through the chapters. Includes complementary nonlinear dynamic inversion control approach, with relevant aircraft examples. Fills the gap in the market for a text including non-linear flight dynamics and continuation methods.