Modeling and Simulation of Shipboard Launch and Recovery of Helicopters - An Overview of AVT-315

AVT-315 is a NATO Research Technology Group that began its work in October 2017 and finished in December 2022. The project brought together a number of research organizations with a common interest in modeling the helicopter-ship dynamic interface. To align existing and future research activity, and to enable comparisons between the outputs from the different organizations, the NATO Generic Destroyer, or NATO-GD, and the NATO Generic Rotorcraft, or NATO-GR, have been created. An essential component for simulating the dynamic interface is the air flow over the ship, i.e. the ship ‘airwake’. Members of AVT-315 have applied their own CFD methods to creating the airwakes for the NATO-GD, including realistic ship motion in pitch, roll and heave. Velocity measurements in the air flow over the landing deck of a 1/50th scale model NATO-GD have been obtained with the ship moving with the same motion profiles as used in the CFD analyses for comparison with the various computational modeling approaches. The capstone event for AVT-315 was to implement computationally-derived airwakes of the full-scale NATO-GD into a motion-base flight simulator. A team of test pilots flew the NATO-GR to the deck of the NATO-GD in various challenging ship airwake and ship motion conditions. The paper will present a selection of results from the project.