Design Limitations for Runway Operations of Gliding Aircraft

The conceptual design of future high-Mach airframes relies upon constraints imposed by simplified feasibility and performance screening metrics. Reusable aircraft must safely land under all circumstances, including situations with engines inoperative. To identify designs that permit unpowered aircraft to operate in real-world runways, we developed a novel method optimizing kinematic performance, which a designer can use to discover emerging (statistical) relationships to predict landing feasibility. To land under “dead-stick” (unpowered) conditions with a low-[Formula: see text] aircraft, pilots cannot fly standard stabilized approaches to the threshold. Instead, these aircraft must arrest their sink rate through a dynamic maneuver initiated far in advance of the runway. This parametric study identifies design space regions where unpowered aircraft can land following generalized procedures. We also identify regions of the design space requiring specialized procedures as well as still others that simply cannot perform a safe landing.