Analysis of the VISTA longitudinal simulation capability for a cruise flight condition

The variable stability in-flight simulator test aircraft (VISTA) is the next-generation US in-flight simulator for high-performance aircraft developed by the US Air Force. The authors estimate the range of dynamic response characteristics that the VISTA can simulate for the longitudinal mode of an up-and-away flight condition. The analysis matched the angle-of-attack time response of a low-order model to a linear simulation of the VISTA aircraft for a range of feedback gain sets. The analysis indicates that the VISTA aircraft does not meet the goal for up-and-away short-period mode. VISTA also does not meet the requirement for having less than 70 msec of equivalent time delay between the model and VISTA aircraft response for an aircraft with no time delay. This will have less effect in practice because all modern aircraft have time delay due to actuators and computations from hardware and software