Abstract
For decades, airships have being developed in Europe (especially German) and America. Airships are planning to be used for advertisements and airliners as well. In Korea, KARI (Korea Aerospace Research Institute) is developing stratospheric communication airship and the similar research is carried out in Japan. Among them, Zeppelin of German has the cutting-edge airship technology with Zeppelin NT. In this paper, the flight performance and stability were evaluated by comparing mathematical theory and the real test. The stability was examined through dynamic modeling and assured by designing controllers at each flight mode. Elevator angle, rudder angle, magnitude of thrust and tilting angle of thrust vector were used as control inputs. Moreover, after measuring the airship velocity, flight direction, magnitude and direction of the wind, attitude angles and trajectories of the airship at each flight mode, the results were compared with the simulation. To get the reasonable data, low-pass filter and band-stop filter were designed to get rid of the sensor noise and engine vibration. The test was accomplished at cruise mode, turning mode, and deceleration. To conclude, with comparing the simulation data and flight test data, it could be known that the dynamic model used in this paper was reasonable.