Effects of short period angle of attack oscillation on air-to-ground weapons dive delivery accuracy.

Abstract

A theoretical investigation of the effects of short period angle of attack oscillation on air-to-ground weapons dive delivery accuracy was conducted. The investigation included the computer modeling of the longitudinal control system of the F-4 aircraft. This longitudinal control system was used to fly the aircraft through its standard conventional dive bomb delivery maneuver, making corrections for various dive angle errors, detected four thousand feet above release altitude. The dynamics of the F-4 aircraft motion was represented by a matrix of dimensional, body axis longitudinal stability derivatives and force coefficients. This matrix representation of the aircraft dynamics was used to solve for the time history of aircraft perturbation, velocity, angle of attack, pitch angle, pitch rate and flight path angle, following correction to the desired delivery maneuver flight path. The perturbation angle of attack is a measure of the gunsight aimpoint error at any given time, if all other delivery parameters are met, and converts directly to weapon impact error.