Analyses Of Aircraft Responses To Atmospheric Turbulence

When considering an input-output system such as an aircraft subjected to stochastic atmospheric turbulence, a major problem emerges. During flight tests, no practical difficulty arises measuring the aircraft-system's outputs, such as the angle-of-attack, the pitch-angle, the roll-angle, etc. However, a huge problem arises when the input to the aircraft-system is considered; this input is stochastic atmospheric turbulence in this thesis. Currently, it still remains extremely difficult to identify the entire flowfield around an aircraft's geometry subjected to a turbulent field of flow; an infinite amount of sensors would be required to identify the atmospheric turbulence velocity component's distribution (the input) over it. As a consequence, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify atmospheric turbulence models from flight tests.