The vehicle configuration, dynamics and flight envelope

The helicopter is required to perform as a dynamic system within the user-defined operational flight envelope (OFE), or that combination of airspeed, altitude, rate of climb/descent, sideslip, turn rate, load factor and other limiting parameters that bound the vehicle dynamics, required to fulfil the user’s function. Beyond this lies the manufacturer-defined safe flight envelope (SFE), which sets the limits to safe flight, normally in terms of the same parameters as the OFE, but represents the physical limits of structural, aerodynamic, powerplant, transmission or flight control capabilities. The margin between the OFE and the SFE needs to be large enough so that inadvertent transient excursions beyond the OFE are tolerable. Within the OFE, the flight mechan­ics of a helicopter can be discussed in terms of three characteristics – trim, stability and response, a classification covered in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

Trim is concerned with the ability to maintain flight equilibrium with controls fixed; the most general trim condition is a turning (about the vertical axis), descending or climbing (assuming constant air density and temperature), sideslipping manoeuvre at constant speed. More conventional flight conditions such as hover, cruise, autorotation or sustained turns are also trims, of course, but the general case is distinguished by the four ‘outer’ flight-path states, and this is simply a consequence of having four independent helicopter controls – three for the main rotor and one for the tail rotor. The rotorspeed is not normally controllable by the pilot, but is set to lie within the automatically governed range. For a helicopter, the so-called inner states – the fuselage attitudes and rates – are uniquely defined by the flight path states in a trim condition. For tilt rotors and other compound rotorcraft, the additional controls provide more flexibility in trim, but such vehicles will not be covered in this book.

Stability is concerned with the behaviour of the aircraft when disturbed from its trim condition; will it return or will it depart from its equilibrium point? The initial tendency has been called the static stability, while the longer term characteristics, the dynamic stability. These are useful physical concepts, though rather crude, but the keys to developing a deeper understanding and quantification of helicopter stability comes from theoretical modelling of the interacting forces and moments. From there come the concepts of small perturbation theory and linearization, of stability and control derivatives and the natural modes of motion and their stability characteristics. The insight value gained from theoretical modelling is particularly high when consider­ing the response to pilot controls and external disturbances. Typically, a helicopter responds to a single-axis control input with multi-axis behaviour; cross-coupling is almost synonymous with helicopters. In this book we shall be dealing with direct and coupled responses, sometimes described as on-axis and off-axis responses. On-axis responses will be discussed within a framework of response types – rate, attitude and translational-rate responses will feature as types that characterize the initial response following a step control input. Further discussion is deferred until the modelling sec­tion within this Tour and later in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. Some qualitative appreciation of vehicle dynamics can be gained, however, without recourse to detailed modelling.