Implications of Recent Rotary Rig Results for Flight Prediction

Analysis of rotary balance data on a generic aircraft model revealed the nature of the flow mechanisms present in subscale experiments, which included the existence of support interference. Recent results on the F/A-18 confirmed the existence of a threshold rotation rate in the rotary data and revealed that in the nonlinear domain at elevated angles of attack, alternatively deterministic or chaotic behavior will prevail, depending on whether or not the magnitude of the initial rotation rate exceeds the threshold value.