Minimum time vertical turn of a helicopter

The performance of the helicopters has improved remarkably in recent years. For some helicopters, high mobility is demanded because it sometimes requires extreme movement ability. The purpose of this paper is to apply the technique generally used for trajectory optimization of a fixed wing airplane to analysis of the helicopter mobility. We formulated the two dimensional minimum time vertical turn of a helicopter as the parameter optimization problem and analyzed numerically by using the technique of non-linear programming and show the most suitable orbit and variables. The non-linear programming is quite useful for analysis of optimal problems. The calculation method is the sequential quadratic programming that is well-known method for non-linear programming. The results show the characteristics of the helicopter reasonably.