Select pilots early next year will begin testing new flight control software, funded in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), intended to facilitate aircraft landings on Navy carrier decks with unprecedented accuracy.
Pilots performing carrier landings today line up with a moving flight deck in a complicated process. They must constantly adjust their speed and manipulate the aircraft’s flight control surfaces to maintain the proper glide path and alignment to the flight deck for an arrested landing. Throughout their approach, pilots eye a set of lights (the fresnel lens) located on the left side of the ship that signals whether they are coming in too high or too low.
The new algorithm embedded in the flight control software augments the landing approach. Coupled with an experimental shipboard light system called a Bedford Array and accompanying cockpit heads-up display symbols, the software ties the movement of the pilot’s control stick directly to the aircraft’s flight path. Instead of constantly adjusting the plane’s trajectory indirectly through attitude changes, the pilot maneuvers the aircraft to project a dotted green line in the heads-up display over a target light shining in the landing area.
The software has been incorporated into an F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet flight simulator. Once the results are tabulated, the engineers plan to integrate the refined algorithm onto an actual aircraft for flight tests and demonstrations. If the tests are successful, the software could be integrated aboard current and future aircraft to change the way carrier-based aviators have landed aboard ships for more than half a century — controlled crash landings.
