Rotorcraft Handling Qualities for Shipboard Operations

ADS-33E-PRF, the U.S. Army’s rotorcraft handling qualities specification, was developed for land-based operations. As its use is expanding to the maritime role, by the US Navy and other navies, the need for expansion of the specification to cover maritime operations is becoming more apparent. To this end, the Naval Air Systems Command has funded several research programs aimed at producing a revision to ADS-33E-PRF that addresses maritime missions. A decade ago, the Canadian National Research Council’s Flight Research Laboratory developed a surrogate task for the shipboard mission using the Superslide device. Results from that experiment were promising; additional data was required, however, to cover different response types and degraded visual environments. In the current study, U.S. Navy and civilian test pilots, along with Canadian test pilots, flew the National Research Council’s variable-stability Bell 205A helicopter, simulating a series of different aircraft response types, against the Superslide and against ADS-33E-PRF tasks to assess the utility of the device.