CFD and Flight controls design practices RSS

1. Introduction: This is an article written from my 20 year experience in flight testing airliners and industrial/ military aircraft. This article is in no way trying to explain how to flight test the above vehicles, but rather is an adaptation of the core philosophy to the hobby/ UAV world. This is a rather slow and resource intensive method but it is quite essential to the designer who puts a new airframe, never flown before in the air. The procedure below will also be useful to the professional modeler who wants to flight test a very complex scale model already on...

1.    Introduction One thing that I have learned after 20 years of building and flying all kinds of UAVs and remote controlled vehicles is that a proper testing routine of all the aircraft systems prior to the maiden is essential to ensure the success of the test flight program. You can decide to go straight ahead and maiden project fresh from the workshop. But this would mean that you’d actually test the aircraft components and systems in real flight conditions. Or you can decide to follow a complete test routine and try to troubleshoot as many things as possible before the test phase,...