Transition to Hover for a Flying Wing with Electric Propulsion

We revisit a 1950s era wind tunnel test of a wing-propeller combination and present an approximate analytic model of the lift and drag forces generated by a wing completely immersed in the slipstream of the propellers for a range of angles of attack from 0-90°. We compare the analytic model to the experimental results by recreating the experiment in simulation. We then use the aerodynamic model along with an appropriate propeller thrust model to demonstrate how the Projection Operator Newton method for Trajectory Optimization, PRONTO, can be used to map curves specified on the equilibrium manifold to the space of trajectories of a flying wing model.