Bifurcation Analysis of the NASA GTM with a View to Upset Recovery

The loss of control in-flight of civil airliners is a matter of great concern to the aviation industry. Loss of control in-flight often involves so called ‘upset’ conditions and, hence, the ability to recover from upset will reduce the frequency of loss of control incidents. This paper presents the use of bifurcation analysis, complemented by time-history simulations, to understand the flight dynamics of the open loop NASA Generic Transport Model with a view to identifying the attractors of the dynamical system that underlie upset behaviour. A number of drivers for potential upset conditions have been discovered which include non-oscillatory spirals and oscillatory spins. Time-histories of the upset conditions yield the response characteristics associated with these upset scenarios.