Reconfiguring NASA Generic Transport Model for Normal Flight Envelope Simulation and Analysis

NASA Generic Transport Model (GTM) is a subscale airplane developed within the NASA Aviation Safety Program's Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control Project with the aim of studying critical flight conditions outside the normal flight envelope without taking the risks of full-scale manned aircraft flight tests. Extensive wind tunnel tests were carried out on the model at the NASA Langley center to create extended flight envelope dataset. As part of the NASA project, a nonlinear high fidelity simulated model of GTM was developed in MATLAB
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and Simulink
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environment which utilizes the extensive wind tunnel test data in tabular form as the required aerodynamic database. The Simulink model is very useful in studies which require a valid high fidelity nonlinear model; however there are asymmetries in the model configuration and aerodynamic database which result in considerable amount of error if the model is used for normal flight envelope simulation and analysis. In this paper, the sources of the model asymmetry are explained and the model is reconfigured such that it can be correctly used for normal flight envelope studies. A number of simulations are provided which verify the model reconfiguration.