What is it about?

When seaplanes take off from or alight on water, pilots need to be careful so that the aircraft does not go into a dangerous coupled oscillation mode between planing and heaving called porpoising. This paper proposes a method to avoid this oscillation by design of the hull and the support system between the aircraft and the floats.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

1. Porpoising is a poorly understood phenomenon, understanding how to avoid it may contribute to the safety of seaplane operations and increase availability of seaplanes. 2. It shows a way to mitigate the risk of porpoising by design. The proposed method has a potential to enable more detailed trade off analysis in stability of seaplanes at conceptual study stage i.e. let you perform parametric studies. 3. It shows a new way to mitigate porpoising using "flexible support".

Perspectives

Further validation and elaboration of the proposed methods should enable better design of seaplanes and amphibians leading to viable alternative to land=based aircraft.

Dr Keiichi Ito
Helmholtz Zentrum München

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Longitudinal Stability Augmentation of Seaplanes in Planing, Journal of Aircraft, September 2016, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/1.c033588.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page