Prediction and Simulator Verification of Roll/Lateral Adverse Aeroservoelastic Rotorcraft–Pilot Couplings

Abstract

The involuntary interaction of a pilot with an aircraft can be described as pilot-assisted oscillations. Such
phenomena are usually only addressed late in the design process when they manifest themselves during ground/flight
testing. Methods to be able to predict such phenomena as early as possible are therefore useful. This work describes a
technique to predict the adverse aeroservoelastic rotorcraft–pilot couplings, specifically between a rotorcraft’s roll
motion and the resultant involuntary pilot lateral cyclic motion. By coupling linear vehicle aeroservoelastic models
and experimentally identified pilot biodynamic models, pilot-assisted oscillations and no-pilot-assisted oscillation
conditions have been numerically predicted for a soft-in-plane hingeless helicopter with a lightly damped regressive
lead–lag mode that strongly interacts with the roll modeat a frequency within the biodynamic band of the pilots. These
predictions have then been verified using real-time flight-simulation experiments. The absence of any similar adverse
couplings experienced while using only rigid-body models in the flight simulator verified that the observed
phenomena were indeed aeroelastic in nature. The excellent agreement between the numerical predictions and the
observed experimental results indicates that the techniques developed in this paper can be used to highlight the
proneness of new or existing designs to pilot-assisted oscillations