Ship Motion Pattern Directed VTOL Letdown Guidance

This paper examines ship motion pattern directed letdown guidance strategies for landing a VTOL aircraft onboard a small aviation ship under adverse environmental conditions. Off-line computer simulation of the shipboard landing task is utilized for assessing the relative merits of the proposed guidance schemes. A sum of seventy sinusoids representation is used to model the ship motion time histories. The touchdown performance of a nominal constant-rate-of-descent (CROD) letdown strategy serves as a benchmark for ranking the performance of the alternative letdown schemes.