Handling qualities

Handling qualities is one of the two principal regimes in the science of flight test (the other being performance). Handling qualities involves the study and evaluation of the stability and control characteristics of an aircraft. They have a critical bearing on the safety of flight and on the ease of controlling an airplane in steady flight and in maneuvers.

To understand the discipline of handling qualities, the concept of stability should be understood. Stability can be defined only when the vehicle is in trim; that is, there are no unbalanced forces or moments acting on the vehicle to cause it to deviate from steady flight. If this condition exists, and if the vehicle is disturbed, stability refers to the tendency of the vehicle to return to the trimmed condition. If the vehicle initially tends to return to a trimmed condition, it is said to be statically stable. If it continues to approach the trimmed condition without overshooting, the motion is called a subsidence. If the motion causes the vehicle to overshoot the trimmed condition, it may oscillate back and forth. If this oscillation damps out, the motion is called a damped oscillation and the vehicle is said to be dynamically stable. On the other hand, if the motion increases in amplitude, the vehicle is said to be dynamically unstable.

The theory of stability of airplanes was worked out by G. H. Bryan in England in 1904. This theory is essentially equivalent to the theory taught to aeronautical students today and was a remarkable intellectual achievement considering that at the time Bryan developed the theory, he had not even heard of the Wright brothers' first flight. Because of the complication of the theory and the tedious computations required in its use, it was rarely applied by airplane designers. Obviously, to fly successfully, pilotless airplanes had to be dynamically stable. The airplane flown by the Wright brothers, and most airplanes flown thereafter, were not stable, but by trial and error, designers developed a few planes that had satisfactory flying qualities. Many other airplanes, however, had poor flying qualities, which sometimes resulted in crashes.

Bryan showed that the stability characteristics of airplanes could be separated into longitudinal and lateral groups with the corresponding motions called modes of motion. These modes of motion were either aperiodic, which means that the airplane steadily approaches or diverges from a trimmed condition, or oscillatory, which means that the airplane oscillates about the trim condition. The longitudinal modes of a statically stable airplane following a disturbance were shown to consist of a long-period oscillation called the phugoid oscillation, usually with a period in seconds about one-quarter of the airspeed in miles per hour and a short-period oscillation with a period of only a few seconds. The lateral motion had three modes of motion: an aperiodic mode called the spiral mode that could be a divergence or subsidence, a heavily damped aperiodic mode called the roll subsidence, and a short-period oscillation, usually poorly damped, called the Dutch roll mode.

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