Flight dynamics, interactively!

It's possible to match two interesting things: flight dynamics and interactive programming with Python. The magic tool we're going to use is called Jupyter Notebook. Basically, it's Python programming done with our favourite web browser.

As we seen in the previous post about flight dynamics, the coupling of rigid body motions and aerodynamics leads to a peculiar aircraft behaviour. Using a Jupyter notebook, we're going to integrate the equations of motion as function of time. We'll produce some plots (like the one below!) showing the short and long term response of the airplane.

The rigid rotation is shown in this plot. The short term oscillations disappear after few seconds since the short period mode is strongly damped. However, the long term response is dominated by the phugoid mode which has low frequency and little damping.

I've included the Jupyter notebook I used to produce this plot here below. The implementation is quite technical but I tried to include some comments to make it easier to read. However, if you are interested, please feel free to contact me!

#shortperiod #phugoid #flightdynamics #python