Ship based Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) are an important tool used by the United States Navy for situational awareness and short-range operations. Naval UAS are used to provide real-time intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and target-acquisition while being low cost, mission flexible, and safe. Unfortunately UAS suffer disadvantages with respect to adverse environmental conditions caused by the air being displaced by the ship. The accumulation of one or more adverse conditions is known as airwake. To counteract the effects of airwake, the objectives of this work are to first evaluate the effect of forces and moments during the vertical landing phase of an aircraft model and second identify the vertical landing path that will minimize the forces and moments acting on the aircraft model.
To accomplish these objectives, an overview of the aircraft models component’s mass and aerodynamic properties are given. An overview of the V-BAT UAV model and prescribed landing trajectories are discussed. The V-BAT model is simulated over a sweep of bank angles and altitudes. The simulation force and moment data are evaluated using two methods. The first method evaluates the average and standard deviation of the forces and moments at each altitude and bank angle. The second method creates contour plots of the bank angles that minimize the forces and moments acting on the V-BAT model at each altitude and time step. The results show, during landing, the forces and moments are minimised by following a series of bank angles taken from the minimum force and moment contour plot data
