Piloted Flight Simulation of Helicopter Recovery to the Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carrier

This Paper describes how flight simulation has been used to investigate helicopter recovery operations to the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the United Kingdom’s new aircraft carrier. A helicopter flight simulation environment has been developed in which the unsteady airflow over the ship has been created using full-scale computational fluid dynamics. A six-degree-of-freedom motion flight simulator has been used to conduct real-time piloted deck landings where a helicopter flight dynamics model representative of a Sikorsky SH-60B Seahawk helicopter was recovered to the designated rotorcraft landing spots toward the stern of the ship. A test pilot was instructed to land the helicopter and to give workload ratings for the difficulty of the task when flying in relative winds from Ahead, and 45 deg and 90 deg from starboard. The workload ratings, along with the corresponding pilot control activity and helicopter positional accuracy, are discussed in relation to the airflow to which the helicopter was subjected. The Paper demonstrates how flight simulation could be used to support flight trials and helicopter clearance activities but also notes that real-world trials data are needed to compare with the simulations before the techniques can be beneficially deployed