Preliminary Progress in Establishing Motion Fidelity Requirements for Maritime Rotorcraft Flight Simulators

Memon, Wajih ORCID: 0000-0002-9550-0440, White, MD ORCID: 0000-0002-8611-9525 and Owen, Ieuan ORCID: 0000-0001-5642-736X (2018) Preliminary Progress in Establishing Motion Fidelity Requirements for Maritime Rotorcraft Flight Simulators. In: American Helicopter Society 74th Annual Forum, 2018-5-14 - 2018-5-18, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

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Abstract

The UK’s Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary regularly perform launch and recovery operations of helicopters to and from their ships. These operations are carried out in challenging conditions such as confined ship deck space, irregular ship motion, sea spray and unsteady airflows, posing a high risk to the helicopter, ship and the crew. Together these elements form the Helicopter Ship Dynamic Interface (HSDI) environment (Ref. 1). To determine the limitations of the safe operability of helicopters to ships, a safety envelope is constructed through First-of Class Flight Trials (FOCFT) for every combination of helicopter/ship, to determine Ship Helicopter Operating Limits (SHOL) (Ref. 2), which detail the safe environmental conditions for launch and recovery operations. FOCFTs are performed at sea and are inevitably very expensive, which can typically take weeks to construct a SHOL envelope and very often the required wind and sea conditions may not be available, resulting in the development of a conservative SHOL (Ref. 3). Therefore, Modelling and Simulation (M&S) of the HSDI environment is being used to mitigate these risks, making SHOL testing safer, quicker and cost-effective and aims to inform the key test points of high uncertainty to test at sea (Ref. 4-6). The reliability of this support depends upon the identification of the fidelity requirements of the M&S elements, such as the motion and visual cueing, the flight dynamics model and the integration of unsteady airflow to represent the ship’s airwake (Ref. 5). Attempts have been made to assess the fidelity of the rotorcraft simulators (JSHIP (Ref. 5)), however, a standardized guideline to quantify the overall simulation fidelity is a challenge which is yet to be fully addressed (Ref. 7). The research presented in this paper is part of a project being carried out at the University of Liverpool, funded by QinetiQ and Dstl, which aims to achieve the following objective: “To undertake a structured examination of the M&S elements of the HSDI simulation environment to develop a new robust simulation fidelity matrix to support at sea flight trials.”

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Flight simulation, Helicopter, Fidelity, Helicopter Ship Dynamic Interface, Modelling and Simulation, Ship Helicopter Operating Limits, Motion Cueing
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	08 Jul 2019 10:07
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 00:38
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3049003