Stalling transport aircraft

Abstract

Airbus and Boeing are cooperatively presenting this topic dealing with transport aircraft stalls. The paper will begin by defining a stall, followed by a review of requirements, predictive validation and flight testing. There are various ways of designing modern jet transports for the stall regime such as aerodynamic approaches, flight deck indications, and augmentation control laws to deal with the high angle-of-attack (α) arena. The goal of augmented control laws for high α is common – no full aerodynamic stall or loss of climb performance should occur in the operational flight envelope, in Normal flight control modes. The validation techniques employed in preparation for a flight test campaign will follow. These include flight characteristic predictions based on wind-tunnel data as well as pilot-in-the-loop simulation rehearsals. The preparation for flight testing will be reviewed from both the engineer and pilot viewpoints. This will be followed by a review of various flight testing that has been conducted. The paper will close with a brief foray into what the future of transport stalls could be – perhaps protection features in degraded flight control modes? What are the benefits as well as drawbacks to increased augmentation for high α?