Basic Study on Short Distance Landing Control with Reverse Thrust of Variable Pitch Propeller for Fixed Wing Electric Aircraft

In the aviation industry, a short landing distance for aircraft is quite important which may broaden the usage of it. For a propeller-driven aircraft, variable pitch propeller (VPP) is widely used to create reverse thrust as air brake. However, because of the complexity of VPP mechanism and low controllability of internal combustion engine, a hydraulic type VPP may not allow a large range variation of the pitch angle. On the other hand, regarding electric aircrafts, its controllability is approximately 100 times higher than conventional engine thanks to a fast response of electric motor. This characteristic may make it possible to use wider range of pitch angle to make larger thrust for shorter landing distance than usual. In this paper, a basic study of the feasibility of using VPP to achieve the short landing distance control for a fixed wing electric aircraft is conducted. A pitch angle transition for opposite direction as to a conventional transition is proposed for the larger reverse thrust. An experiment is conducted to obtain a static characteristic of VPP for the larger thrust. To the end, simulations are conducted to verify the proposed pitch angle transition for shorter landing distance with parameter identified in experiments, and it is confirmed that the proposed method can reduce the landing distance up to 30 % compared to the conventional pitch transition.