Expedient Flight Test With Inexperienced Test Pilots

Test piloting is often portrayed as the pinnacle of pilot skill and achievement. While many people start the training to be pilots, only some of those persist until they achieve certification. A smaller number continue to train and become professional pilots, whether for civilian or military roles. A small number of professional pilots continue on to become test pilots, possessing the control skill, technical understanding, and discipline needed to fly aircraft so new and uncertain that they are outside the domain of pilots with lesser skill. Those lesser-skilled pilots may be unable to fly the aircraft with sufficient precision to extract meaningful flight test results, so professional test pilots are employed to determine the performance specifications that are included in the airplane flight manual. But what should happen if a non-test-pilot wishes to characterize the performance of an aircraft? Is the ambition futile, or is there a process by which these pilots could determine meaningful results? The current work is a continuation of a multi-year program performing flight tests with pilots who may be unfamiliar with standard flight test techniques. The focus of this paper is developing analysis methods that can extract performance characteristics in spite of pilot skill limitations.