pyaerso: A Rust-backed Python Module for Accessible Flight Dynamics Modelling for Machine Learning

This work presents an open-source Python module for flight dynamics modelling, with the core numerical operations implemented in Rust for improved performance. The primary use case is as part of machine learning research, where Python is the dominant language. Previous machine learning work by the authors had begun to show the performance limitations of a pure Python flight dynamics model. The module presented here began development in order to accelerate future models. To evaluate the module, a simple model was implemented using it and an equivalent was created for JSBSim. This was then used to benchmark performance and compare interfaces and workflows. For the simple model used, performance of the new module is shown to be comparable to JSBSim, and indeed faster when extracting state at each timestep from a Python wrapper. In future machine learning work, this improved performance will allow more training time for machine learning models, resulting in better trained agents capable of performing more complex manoeuvres.