Abstract

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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>This work aims to deal with a comprehensive review of design methods for aircraft directional stability and vertical tail sizing. The focus on aircraft directional stability is due to the significant discrepancies that classical semi-empirical methods, as USAF DATCOM and ESDU, provide for some configurations because they are based on NACA wind tunnel (WT) tests about models not representative of an actual transport airplane.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title>
<jats:p>The authors performed viscous numerical simulations to calculate the aerodynamic interference among aircraft parts on hundreds configurations of a generic regional turboprop aircraft, providing useful results that have been collected in a new vertical tail preliminary design method, named VeDSC.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title>
<jats:p>The reviewed methods have been applied on a regional turboprop aircraft. The VeDSC method shows the closest agreement with numerical results. A WT test campaign involving more than 180 configurations has validated the numerical approach.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title>
<jats:p>The investigation has covered both the linear and the non-linear range of the aerodynamic coefficients, including the mutual aerodynamic interference between the fuselage and the vertical stabilizer. Also, a preliminary investigation about rudder effectiveness, related to aircraft directional control, is presented.</jats:p>
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<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title>
<jats:p>In the final part of the paper, critical issues in vertical tail design are reviewed, highlighting the significance of a good estimation of aircraft directional stability and control derivatives.</jats:p>
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