Air Combat Manoeuvres

Computer flight simulation is one of the fastest growing modern hobbies, with thousands of 'pilots' or 'simmers' going online everyday to pit their flying skills against their computers or opponents from all over the world, in many different scenarios, both current and historical. 'Flight simmers', in terms of interest, can be placed into three categories - general aviation, airliners and combat simulation. The one common theme is the desire to be able to improve their flying skills. This is the definitive guide for flight simmers interested in combat simulation with easily accessible information and colourful illustrations that can be used as a guide to the methods of air combat from World War One to the modern day. Using state of the art digital illustration techniques the book shows how and when to employ the best manoeuvres to beat both the computer and other players. Diagrams show both the manoeuvre itself and the actual methods used on the joystick. Further sections deal with ground attack, mission planning and the historical perspective. It will be relevant to those at an entry level and those who have been in online gaming communities for years and will be ideal for both the expert gamer and the more casual player. Eminent author Steve Thompson wrote one of the original guides to air manoeuvres for flight simmers twenty five years ago, and has now updated his original best selling book to give the flight simmer the complete guide to flight simulation combat manoeuvres in the most modern context. To help bring the book to life the text and diagrams are supported by historical narratives derived from real combat pilots, design histories on key aircraft, and enviable full colour profile artworks.

This book provides a detailed discussion of one-on-one dog-fights and multi-fighter team work tactics. Full discussions of fighter aircraft and weapons systems performance are provided along with an explanation of radar intercept tactics and an analysis of the elements involved in the performance of fighter missions.

This is the definitive guide for flight simmers interested in combat simulation with easily accessible information and colourful illustrations that can be used as a guide to the methods of air combat from World War One to the modern day. Using state of the art digital illustration techniques the book shows how and when to employ the best manoeuvres to beat both the computer and other players. Diagrams show both the manoeuvre itself and the actual methods used on the joystick. Further sections deal with ground attack, mission planning and the historical perspective. It will be relevant to those at an entry level and those who have been in online gaming communities for years and will be ideal for both the expert gamer and the more casual player.

Donated.

Flight control design for modern fighter aircraft is a challenging task. Aircraft are dynamical systems, which naturally contain a variety of constraints and nonlinearities such as, e.g., maximum permissible load factor, angle of attack and control surface deflections. Taking these limitations into account in the design of control systems is becoming increasingly important as the performance and complexity of the aircraft is constantly increasing. The aeronautical industry has traditionally applied feedforward, anti-windup or similar techniques and different ad hoc engineering solutions to handle constraints on the aircraft. However these approaches often rely on engineering experience and insight rather than a theoretical foundation, and can often require a tremendous amount of time to tune. In this thesis we investigate model predictive control as an alternative design tool to handle the constraints that arises in the flight control design. We derive a simple reference tracking MPC algorithm for linear systems that build on the dual mode formulation with guaranteed stability and low complexity suitable for implementation in real time safety critical systems. To reduce the computational burden of nonlinear model predictive control we propose a method to handle the nonlinear constraints, using a set of dynamically generated local inner polytopic approximations. The main benefit of the proposed method is that while computationally cheap it still can guarantee recursive feasibility and convergence. An alternative to deriving MPC algorithms with guaranteed stability properties is to analyze the closed loop stability, post design. Here we focus on deriving a tool based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming for analysis of the closed loop stability and robust stability of linear systems controlled with MPC controllers. To test the performance of model predictive control for a real world example we design and implement a standard MPC controller in the development simulator for the JAS 39 Gripen aircraft at Saab Aeronautics. This part of the thesis focuses on practical and tuning aspects of designing MPC controllers for fighter aircraft. Finally we have compared the MPC design with an alternative approach to maneuver limiting using a command governor.