Plane Landing Example

This example demonstrates how to use flight-mech to compute the landing characteristics of a plane.

Imports

# Python imports
import os
import sys
sys.path.append("..")

# Additional imports
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Flight-Mech imports
from flight_mech.plane import Plane

Plane definition

Let us use in this case the Cessna Citation III defined in the database.

# Load the plane
plane = Plane("cessna_citation_III")

Landing characteristics

We can now define a runway by its altitude and friction coefficient, set the plane in landing configuration and compute the landing distance and velocities.

# Define the friction coefficient of the landing strip
mu = 0.1

# Define the landing altitude
z = 0

# Update some coefficients to set the landing configuration
plane.C_D_0 = plane.C_D_0 * 1.1
plane.m_fuel = 0
plane.C_L_max = 2.5
plane.update_variables(force=True)

# Print the results
print("weight [N]", plane.P)
print("landing speed [m.s-1]", plane.compute_landing_speed(z))
print("landing distance [m]", plane.compute_landing_distance(z, mu, C_L=0))

weight [N] 54936.0
landing speed [m.s-1] 45.33584221198617
landing distance [m] 976.4188122310702