Director, Vehicle Systems, Dynamics, and Design Laboratory (VSDDL), Associate Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Auburn University
What a great photo! VSDDL graduate student Anthony Comer (red T-shirt) and ACELab graduate student Yevhenii Kovryzhenko (green T-shirt) standing behind two subscale vehicles that were flight-tested on the same day. Anthony is standing behind the VSDDL LPC-03-s Phoenix Lite Mk II, the current manifestation of the lift-plus-cruise design that VSDDL used to secure 1st place at the 2023 VFS DBVF competition. Yevhenii is standing behind the Transcend Air Corporation/VSDDL Risk Reduction Test Vehicle (RRTV), a subscale of Transcend's Vy 400 tilt-wing design. The configuration difference (lift-plus-cruise vs. tilt-wing) notwithstanding, the two subscales have much in common. Both feature custom VSDDL Total Energy-based flight control laws aimed at Simplified Vehicle Operations (SVO). Both make extensive use of 3-D printing in their modular designs. Both use MADCASP flight simulation models to implement, test, and refine their flight control logic prior to flight test. And both are currently being flight-tested through transition along a 1-mile long runway at an abandoned airfield near Tuskegee, AL that was once the airbase of the famed Tuskegee Airmen in WW-II.