Story ID: 
NASA Conducts Rotorcraft Landing Wind Study
By: Gordon Gilbert
Caption: Project aims to find out how wind and weather at landing sites are affected by buildings
Word Count: 234
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, recently completed a six-week wind study aimed at enhancing future air taxi aircraft safety during takeoffs and landings. Included in the research were the Alta-X quadrotor VTOL and Droid 2 light airplane.
The research aims to fill knowledge gaps to resolve wind and weather unknowns at altitudes below 2,000 feet agl that could hinder advanced air mobility flights. Both remotely piloted aircraft flew repeated passes at predetermined altitudes up to 2,000 feet. The Alta-X hovered while mounted sensors obtained data on temperature, pressure, and relative humidity in addition to three-dimensional wind data.
“This multipurpose experiment tests new sensor technologies and makes a detailed study of wind flow around buildings,” said Grady Koch, the project’s principal investigator. “Ground-based support sensors include the ‘virtual tower concept,’ where we have two lidar units that use lasers to measure airflow from the ground level to 2,000 feet.”
Researchers plan to use the wind data to validate and improve modeling techniques. “Computational fluid dynamics is used for determining airflow on small features like wings on airplanes, but for this work, we are using it for a meteorological problem where you have large complex structures,” Koch said.
Findings also will be used to develop onboard processes that allow aircraft to serve as “high-precision wind sensors” and then share that data with other nearby aircraft.