MODELING AND PERFORMANCE ESTIMATION OF FORMATION FLIGHT

Abstract

The aviation industry has grown tremendously during last fifty years. The number of commercial airliners has doubled over the past decade, however, a proportional increase in the environmental degradation is also observed. At present, the contribution of commercial aeronautics to the carbon footprint is approximately around 2%. This poses a great challenge for technology protagonists. The development of stringent emission regulations is forcing the commercial aeronautics community to search for alternate / optimized ways of flying. Moreover, for small UAVs, on-board fuel storage is a big challenge because of dimensional / weight constraints. Such constraints are a cause of significant hindrance in performance of small UAV’s. The solution to both these domains comes from nature inspired observation of migrating birds. They travel across the continents in formation flight and recent research findings show promising benefits of formation flying for man-made aircrafts. Introducing formation flying in commercial aviation can result in cost savings and reduce environmental degradation. This effort takes into account the opportunities provided by formation flying and present an optimized hybrid formation switching mechanism for enhanced range and endurance of commercial aviation as well as small UAVs. This thesis adopts a two prong approach and tries to discuss a common solution to different problems of commercial aeronautics and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs).