Evaluation of Collisions with Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and their Consequences to Rotorcraft

The popularity and dissemination of small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAV) is increasing continuously. Therefore, a collision between such sUAV and manned aircraft is becoming ever more likely. There are legal requirements (allowable mass, prohibited flight zones, height restrictions) to hobby pilots, which should minimize the probability and resulting consequences of an impact. Recent occurrences have shown that these restrictions are either not adhered to or are insufficient. Sharing the same airspace, rotorcraft in particular, are prone to such impact scenarios. Within this paper different scenarios between those aircrafts are defined. The resulting consequences to the rotorcraft structure are determined by analytical approaches and engineering judgement. In order to fully characterize the threat of a drone strike to manned rotorcraft, a test and simulation program is developed and will be carried out in the scope of the research project "Drone strike on aircraft research" - DESIRE. The project will run from Oct. 2018 to May 2022. The test results can be used as basic data for further evaluation and actions. Within this paper the complete program is presented including the extended building block approach with planned testing efforts. First results of performed testing efforts describe the behavior of drone motors upon compression loading. Correlation between finite element simulations and test results enable a comprehensive build up of complete impact scenarios to support further investigations.