In his 1916 book, Aircraft in Warfare, the Dawn of the Fourth Arm, F.W. Lanchester wrote:

The recent successful flight trials of the Taranis low-observable unmanned demonstrator aircraft provide the latest evidence of the UK’s continued capacity for the entire design, development, manufacture, and flight testing of world-leading combat aircraft, particularly with regard to Aerodynamics. Taranis is both the culmination of many years’ research and development in the UK and a starting-point for the next generation of UK combat air systems.

In this lecture, Taranis is reviewed, in such detail as current sensitivities will allow, in the wider context of UK combat aircraft aerodynamic capability, exemplified by the leading roles taken by the UK in the Tornado and Typhoon programmes and the important contribution made to the development of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter.

The immediate technical challenges associated with the aerodynamic design and qualification of a low-observable air vehicle are considerable. In this instance they have been compounded by the balanced view taken within the project of trade-offs against many parameters. However, the UK aerodynamics community faces equally stringent challenges in terms of the identification and delivery of the most appropriate future systems; increasingly complex and demanding operational and functional requirements; and, perhaps most of all, maintaining an affordable and cost-effective capability in the face of strict budgetary pressures and austere economic conditions.

Nevertheless, those challenges are accompanied by a wide range of opportunities, namely for national and international partnership; radically innovative engineering solutions and approaches; new thinking; and the engagement of the best minds and ideas in the UK academic community.

Taranis represented a big integration task, requiring a particular set of skills to pull together the total package, resting on a bedrock of mastery of the technical issues. It has been an inspirational experience for those of us who have worked on it. It has demonstrated that the UK is capable of achieving the most demanding current and anticipated military aerodynamic requirements and has signposted the way to an exciting and nationally important future.

This paper presents a numerical formulation targeting the rapid estimation of natural vibration characteristics of helicopter rotor blades. The proposed method is based on application of Lagrange’s equation of motion to the kinematics of blade flap/lag bending and torsion. Modal properties obtained from Bernoulli-Euler beam and classical torsional vibration theory, are utilised as assumed deformation functions in order to estimate the time variations of strain and kinetic energy for each degree of freedom. Integral expressions are derived, describing the generalised centrifugal force and torsional moment acting on the blade in terms of normal coordinates, for flap/lag transverse displacement and torsional deformation. Closed form expressions are provided for the direct analysis of hingeless, freely-hinged and spring-hinged articulated rotor blades. Results are presented in terms of natural frequencies and mode shapes for two small-scale rotor blade models. Extensive comparisons are carried out with experimental measurements and nonlinear finite element analysis. Predictions of resonant frequencies are also presented for two full-scale rotor blade models and the results are compared with established multi-body dynamics analysis methods. It is shown that, the proposed approach exhibits excellent numerical behaviour with low computational cost and definitive convergence characteristics. The comparisons suggest very good and in some cases excellent accuracy levels, especially considering the method’s simplicity, computational efficiency, and ease of implementation.

An analysis, based upon exact relations and previously published approximate relations, is presented. It describes the connection between changes in aircraft weight and changes in the energy to revenue work ratio (ETRW), which, for a given aircraft on a given route, correspond to changes in trip fuel burn. This is used to establish the link between weight saving and fuel burn improvement at both the total aircraft and the component levels. The analysis is then extended to address the impact of trading weight savings anywhere on the aircraft for increased wing aspect ratio, whilst the aircraft total weight remains the same. It is shown that, for flights in excess of about 350 km, if saving fuel is the objective and provided that all the aerodynamic design and airworthiness requirements can be met, it is better to trade weight saving for increased aspect ratio. In general, the ratio of fuel burn reductions for traded to non-traded weight varies with aircraft size, design range, distance flown and payload carried, with the maximum values, for typical operational payloads, ranging from 2•8, for the smaller aircraft, to 2•2 for the largest aircraft, with medium haul operations deriving the largest benefit. It is estimated that, over the past 50 years, about 10% of the operational empty weight has been traded for increased aspect ratio, giving close to a 20% improvement in ETRW. Finally, estimates are produced for the impact of weight reduction and traded weight reduction on the fuel burn for the current global feet.

Data mining is a data analysis process which is designed for large amounts of data. It proposes a methodology for evaluating risk and safety and describes the main issues of aircraft accidents. We have a huge amount of knowledge and data collection in aviation companies. This paper focuses on different feature selectwindion techniques applied to the datasets of airline databases to understand and clean the dataset. CFS subset evaluator, consistency subset evaluator, gain ratio feature evaluator, information gain attribute evaluator, OneR attribute evaluator, principal components attribute transformer, ReliefF attribute evaluatoboundar and symmetrical uncertainty attribute evaluator are used in this study in order to reduce the number of initial attributes. The classification algorithms, such as DT, KNN, SVM, NN and NB, are used to predict the warning level of the component as the class attribute. We have explored the use of different classification techniques on aviation components data. For this purpose Weka software tools are used. This study also proves that the principal components attribute with decision tree classifier would perform better than other attributes and techniques on airline data. Accuracy is also very highly improved. This work may be useful for an aviation company to make better predictions. Some safety recommendations are also addressed to airline companies.

A new rating scale for capturing pilot subjective assessment of simulation fidelity is described in this paper. The scale has been developed through a series of flight and simulation trials using six test pilots from a variety of backgrounds, and is based on the methodology utilised with the Cooper-Harper Handling Qualities Rating scale and the concepts of transfer of training, comparative task performance and task strategy adaptation. The development of the new rating scale has been undertaken using simulations of rotary-wing aircraft on the University of Liverpool’s HELIFLIGHT-R research simulator, in conjunction with the Canadian Flight Research Laboratory’s Bell 412 ASRA in-flight simulator. The utility of the scale applied to locating fidelity boundaries for quantitative metrics is illustrated for an inter-axis coupling criterion. The work described in this paper is preliminary in nature, and research activities are on-going to continue the validation of the fidelity rating scale.