The Development and Flight Test Demonstrations of an Integrated Automatic Recovery System to Reduce the Opererational Limitations of Embarked Helicopters at Night and in Bad Weather

The recovery of helicopters to small ships is a demanding task, particularly at night, in poor visibility or in adverse wind and high sea states. A significant number of technical problems need to be overcome to reduce current operational limitations. These include locating the ship, especially when operating under emission controlled conditions, establishing recovery profiles which minimise the helicopter handling and pilot workload problems at low airspeeds in beam and tail wind situations, and presenting information to the pilot to maintain a high sense of situation awareness. This paper reports on the research being carried out by the Defence Research Agency to reduce the limitations on large helicopters operating from small ships. The major elements of the work are the development of a Relative GPS/INS based guidance system, the generation of "adaptive" approach profiles, precision automatic helicopter flight path control throughout the speed range with flight director and map based display available as reversionary modes. The paper describes the status of the guidance, display and autopilot systems in use, and reports on the results of an interim ship trial carried out in early 1994.