Direct CFD prediction of dynamic derivatives for a complete transport aircraft in the dry and heavy rain environment

Among various aviation meteorological conditions, heavy rain is an important one that may seriously affect aircraft flight safety. Over the past decades, appreciable efforts have been made to study the impacts of heavy rain on aircraft flight performance. Although there has been a consistent conclusion that heavy rain can cause great static aerodynamic performance degradation, such as lift decrease and drag increase, little has been known on the effects of heavy rain on aircraft dynamic flight performance. This article explores the static and dynamic aerodynamic performance of an approximated model of the DLR-F12 transport aircraft in simulated heavy rain environment. A novel synthesised approach is proposed to study the stability dynamic derivatives in a heavy rain condition. The results suggest that heavy rain not only causes more fuel consumption to compensate the lost lift performance but also induces great dynamic flight performance degradations, especially the short-period mode performance, thus seriously threatens aircraft flight safety.