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Aircraft Design
Applied aircraft design for civil aviation and unmanned aerial systems
n
First flight – These are magical words for any aircraft designer. The highlight of long and intense
activities in designing, manufacturing, integrating and testing is the first time a new aircraft gets
airborne. In 2017 the first flight of the SAGITTA UAV demonstrator took place successfully in South
Africa. In addition, initial flights started with an advanced vertical take-off and landing UAV providing
new capabilities for unmanned systems. These practical demonstrations clearly showed the capa-
bilities of the Institute for Aircraft Design to cover the whole range from initial design up to inflight
technology demonstrations.
In the realization of effective demonstrator vehicles new
manufacturing techniques like additive layer manufactur-
ing have been included to enable even more efficient rapid
prototyping.
These new approaches also enabled new design features
and even innovative functionalities which open up new
design spaces. Further progress will allow for even lighter
and smaller demonstrator aircraft concepts.
SAGITTA First Flight
The development of new technologies and their demon-
stration on a flying demonstrator air vehicle have been
the core challenges of the Airbus Defence & Space led
research cooperation SAGITTA. In an open innovation
approach scientists of multiple universities, DLR and
industry have teamed up to progress technologies for
unmanned air vehicles. After seven years the team
enabled the first flight of SAGITTA at the Overberg test
range in South Africa. The Institute for Aircraft Design
Team success: SAGITTA first flight on 18 July 2017 in South Africa (Airbus Defence & Space)
contributed with its overall design capability and has been
responsible for the propulsion system as well as for novel
flight control devices of the diamond-shaped air vehicle.
With two flawless flights the team showed its capability
to handle even highly complex systems like the 3m span
demonstrator in a collaborative environment. We are
looking forward to further exploit the capabilities that the
demonstrator is able to provide as a test platform. It has
been a big success.