Aircraft acceleration and climb rates are all about specific excess power, but excess power is not a constant throughout the flight envelope. If you know how your aircraft design is optimized, you can get better performance. The same aircraft can be flown on the same route, but by using different climb profiles the enroute time and fuel burn could be very different.
Minimizing time to climb and the ability to efficiently accelerate clearly have both civil air carrier as well as tactical military advantages. These factors are the result of the aircraft's total performance, both in terms of the propulsion system and also its total aerodynamic efficiency.
So how can designers and flight test engineers measure aircraft performance across the entire envelope? The Naval Test Pilot School's Flight Test Manual 108 describes the mathematical theory governing these principles. This course demonstrates how to gather quality data using the level acceleration flight test technique, then thoroughly explains the governing equations, followed by step by step application of the equations to analyze representative flight test data collected in a high fidelity simulator.
This course gives aircraft designers, flight test engineers, and aerodynamic students the understanding and analysis tools to generate plots of Specific Energy Power for any fixed wing aircraft.
The course is designed around a complementary open-source code repository on GitHub, plus free access to the Daedalus Aerospace community for flight test data analytics professionals. Collaborate on your code and data challenges with our world-wide community!