An analysis was conducted to examine the market visibility of small aircraft as a transportation mode in competition with automobile and scheduled commercial air travel by estimating the pool of users that would potentially switch on-demand air travel due to cost/time saving. These new aircraft greatly increase the practicality of regional aircraft as a transportation mode that can avoid the co...

In this combined experimental and numerical study, the propeller–airframe aerodynamic interaction is characterized for an aircraft configuration with propellers mounted to horizontal tailplane. The contributions of propeller airframe overall loading are distinguished in analyses by using a combination external balance internal load cell data. Validated computational fluid dynamics simulations t...

The future of aviation depends on reducing the environmental impact aircraft. Unconventional configurations can be change industry needs to achieve that goal. Therefore, development a tool allows analyzing these will contribute their being considered more easily in designs. This design procedure is based an aerodynamic model and weight methodology validated for unconventional tail load cases se...

By minimizing a cost function consisting of both conventional performance criteria and a measure of aircraft handling qualities, a design with maximum performance for a specified level of handling can be achieved. Handling qualities are measured using a quadratic cost function similar to that used in the design of optimal feedback control systems. This function is proportional to the difference...

Validation and demonstration results from the development of the conceptual design tool NDARC (NASA Design and Analysis of Rotorcraft) are presented. The principal tasks of NDARC are to design a rotorcraft to satisfy specified design conditions and missions, and then analyze the performance of the aircraft for a set of off-design missions and point operating conditions. The aircraft chosen as N...