The development of an educational software for aircraft flight mechanics calculations

Abstract: Due to its versatility and low cost, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles has been rapidly spreading in recent years, in applications ranging form military operations, to land mapping, rescuing of lost people, aiding of natural disaster victims and many others. To properly design and operate such a vehicle, it is necessary to know its flight mechanics in the various stages of the flight. Despite the fact that the physic behind the analysis of an aircraft's flight mechanics is well known and purely based on Classical Mechanics, the large quantity of input and output data involved favors the use of a computational toll. This work presents the development of a toolbox called APT (Aircraft Performance Toolbox), able to make preliminary aircraft flight mechanics calculations regarding its performance. To achieve this goal, a number of Matlab scripts were created to perform the calculations, and a graphical interface was created to unify them and to allow the end-user to perform the analysis in a clear and intuitive way. To illustrate the potential of the toolbox, we use APT to in the analysis of an UAV meant to participate in the SAE Brasil AeroDesign competition of the year of 2014.