Suggestion for aircraft flying qualities requirements of a short-range air combat mission

Owing to the lack of a direct link with the operations in short-range air combat,conventional aircraft flying qualities criteria are inappropriate to guide the design of a task-tailored flight control law.By applying the mission-oriented flying qualities evaluation approach,various aircraft with different control law parameters are evaluated on a ground-based simulator.This paper compares the evaluation results with several conventional flying qualities criteria,and discusses the appropriate parameter combination to reflect the flying qualities requirements of short-range air combat.The comparison and analysis show that a short-range air combat mission requires a higher minimum short period mode natural frequency and a smaller maximum roll mode time constant,and allows a lower minimum pitch attitude bandwidth and a higher maximum short period mode damp ratio than those of conventional flying qualities criteria.Furthermore,a combination of the pitch attitude bandwidth,the pitch attitude magnitude at the bandwidth frequency,and the pitch attitude transfer function gain can define the flying qualities requirements of short-range air combat.The new metric can successfully predict the flying quality levels of aircraft in a short-range air combat mission.