Design and Flight Testing of Ski-jump Take-off Controllers for LCA Navy

A major challenge for naval aircraft that operate from aircraft carrier is to take-off, loaded with weapons and fuel, from very short runways and get airborne. A popular procedure for take-off from carriers is ski-jump take-off. Ski jump ramp imparts a high initial rate of climb and pitch rate to the aircraft as it runs over the ramp during take-off roll. LCA Navy is an unstable fly-by-wire aircraft designed for carrier operations. This paper discusses the phases of development of the control law mode designed for a ‘hands-free’ ski-jump takeoff on LCA Navy. The design has been carried out in two phases: the basic mode and the advanced mode. Flight testing with basic mode has been carried out and some challenges during the first ski-jump flight test have been described here. Improvements made in the basic control law mode to mitigate problems found during the first ski-jump have been described as well. These improvements led to a successful completion of the first phase of 70 ski-jumps on LCA Navy. Design of the advanced ski-jump mode is also presented here. The simulation results by pilots in the real time simulators and flight test data is also presented in this paper.