You're invited to attend

Gebhardt Distinguished Lecture

"Design Advantages of an Integrated Cyber-Physical Aircraft"

by

Nick Lappos

Senior Fellow Emeritus
Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company

September 12
3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
Guggenheim 442

About the Seminar: 
Digital transformation has presented an opportunity to change our process for  development of air vehicles in a revolutionary matter. A digital air vehicle can be considered as a cyber physical system if digital elements are incorporated with the same level of qualification and assurance as the primary structure of the vehicle. In other words, for a cyber physical helicopter system, the digital monitoring and control has the same integrity and reliability as the main rotor blade spars. Heretofore, each subsystem of the aircraft has been designed to incorporate margins of safety that assure adequate performance and ultimate safety throughout the life of the vehicle. 

The sum of all these margins of safety can be a very appreciable percentage of the weight and useful load of the aircraft, which makes these margins ripe for reduction using cyber physical concepts. With digital tools now available (such as on-board usage monitoring and sensing of detailed parameters, real-time analysis of systems behaviors and full authority digital control systems) it is possible to understand the air vehicle as a total entity and to adjust and reallocate the design margins of safety to reflect ongoing operational experience. 

The strength, weight and cost of systems and components can be understood in the design phase, and reallocated during service life to continuously optimize operational capabilities and airworthiness margins. The reallocation of the margins of safety can increase margins where they truly needed, reduce margins where the safety can be controlled otherwise, and thus make an aircraft at once more operationally capable with higher margins of safety and greater airworthiness assurance.

This paper discusses the concepts and how they would apply to the development of an air vehicle the future. Estimates of the weight savings and safety margins of a cyber physical aircraft are made. The challenge of how to implement these concepts is discussed as we consider how to employ these methods in the future.

About the Speaker: 
Nick Lappos is Lockheed Martin Fellow for Rotary and Mission Systems. An Aerospace Engineering graduate of Georgia Tech, he joined Sikorsky Aircraft in 1973. Through 2005 and then again from 2011 to present, he has served in a variety of roles at Sikorsky, including as program director for the S-92® helicopter during its development and certification. Under his leadership, the program earned the Robert J. Collier Trophy. 

Lappos also served as director of Test Engineering and as assistant chief pilot and chief Research and Development test pilot, logging more than 8,000 hours of flight time in over 70 different types of helicopters. Lappos has participated in the development of aircraft such as the S76, UH-60, RAH-66, ABC, Fantail, Shadow, CH-53E, S92. He holds over 40 patents and three helicopter world speed records. He was appointed to the National Academy of Engineering and was Chairman of the NAE Committee on Advanced Air Mobility, which authored the report, ”Advancing Aerial Mobility, A National Blueprint.”  He is co-chair of an AIAA Committee on Certification of Advanced Airmobile aircraft.

Lappos has been a vice president for Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., and a senior vice president and chief technology officer for Bell Helicopter, Textron. He has also served as Chairman of the Vertical Lift Consortium from 2012 to the present.

He is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, where he flew Cobra helicopters. He lives in Cedar City Utah with his wife Mary, in an off-grid solar home of his own design.