Flight-Test Evaluation of Stability Augmentation Steering System for Aircraft Ground Handling (STI Paper Series)

A flight-test program was conducted to evaluate a newly developed stability augmentation steering system (SASS). Designed to improve the ground-handling characteristics of a U.S. Navy jet trainer, the SASS features a yaw-rate feedback that is used to set the heading attitude bandwidth as desired, while providing an essentially constant rudder pedal sensitivity variation with speed. Flight-test efforts were conducted to assess performance of two SASS configurations against the baseline aircraft configuration. Three pilots evaluated the ability of the aircraft to perform a runway offset capture-and-hold maneuver, essentially a lane change task, with and without braking.