Aeronautical Design Software

AAA is a comprehensive aircraft design program that gives users full authority over the entire preliminary design process. From weight and performance sizing to aerodynamics and stability and control analysis, you can monitor all aspects of the design every step of the way.

Physics-Based Methods

The high fidelity, physics-based methods of AAA, combined with its time-tested semi-empirical methods, have improved the ability for aerospace engineers to analyze more unconventional airplane designs and to stay at the forefront of our ever-evolving industry

Configurations

AAA applies to most fixed wing configurations (civil, military and transport aircraft) and allows design engineers to rapidly evolve an aircraft configuration from weight sizing through detailed performance calculations and cost estimations. All applicable performance and flying quality regulations are available in the AAA program. This provides the designer with an instant appraisal of the status of the design relative to these regulations.

Design & Applications

AAA provides a powerful framework to support the iterative and non-unique process of aircraft preliminary design. The AAA program allows students and preliminary design engineers to take an aircraft configuration from early weight sizing through open loop and closed loop dynamic stability and sensitivity analysis, while working within regulatory and cost constraints. AAA can be used to design fighter style aircraft and high speed aircraft. The detailed drag module allows designers to go all the way to supersonic flow. The stability and control derivatives modules only deal with subsonic flow (up to about Mach=0.7) for most derivatives. It does not calculate the derivatives for transonic and supersonic flow. Most other modules do not have a speed dependency and can be used in any speed regime. AAA is used for preliminary and Class II design and stability and control analysis of new and existing aircraft. Class II design incorporates detailed weight & balance, aerodynamics, stability & control calculations including trim analysis and flying qualities used in conjunction with the preliminary design sequence. Class II design accounts for power plant installation, landing gear disposition and component locations on the airplane. Class II uses more sophisticated methods than Class I and requires more detailed information of the airplane to be known. The accuracy of Class II methods is therefore greater than Class I methods.

AAA Benefits

Tested & Verified Commercial Software Product

Saves time

The “Recalculate All” feature in AAA is a significant time savings tool and allows you to export the data for different flight conditions into an Excel or text file. All plots for trim diagram, for example, can be saved as separate graphics files, using this same feature.

Saves money

You will spend more in a two-month period developing your own in-house code, in man-hour cost alone, than if you purchased one commercial license of AAA. You will save over 80% in man-hour costs using AAA for preliminary design, versus using handbook and spreadsheet calculations.

Reduces errors

Using AAA will greatly reduce calculation errors. Being able to use multiple flight conditions (forward c.g., aft c.g., low speed, high speed, flaps up, flaps down, etc.) is a unique feature of AAA and significantly reduces time to track data and prevent potential errors.

Keeps improving

We use AAA for our aircraft design consulting services. We are constantly updating and refining the methods used, based on our research and wind tunnel tests that we perform. This leads to regular software version updates, which benefits all of our software clients.