Development of an Aeronautical Design Standard for Validation of Military Helicopter Simulators

An effort has been undertaken by the US Army to develop and Aeronautical Design Standard for validation of military helicopter simulators. The Standard is intended to be more comprehensive than the Federal Aviation Administration’s Qualification Guide. As an initial investigation into the requirements for the Standard, a fixed-base simulation was conducted to identify whether it would be feasible to define limits on simulation errors in terms of frequency response envelopes. The subject pilot flew a precision hover task with two different sets of dynamic models and with second-order lead-lag filters cascaded onto the roll responses of the models. The damping ratios and natural frequencies of the filters were varied and the pilot was asked to judge whether the added dynamics were noticeable, and whether their presence affected his ability to perform the task. The results provide a data base for the definition of possible allowable error envelopes that are a function of the dynamics of the baseline configurations.