On-Board Near-Optimal Climb-Dash Energy Management

The subject of this paper is the study of optimal and near-optimal trajectories of high-performance fighter aircraft in synuetric flight. On-board, realtime, near-optimal guidance is considered for the climb-dash mission, using some of the boundary-layer structure and hierarchical ideas from singular perturbations. In the case of symnetric flight this resembles neighboring-optimal guidance using energy-togo as the running variable. However, extension to 3-D flight is proposed, using families of nominal paths with heading-to-go as the additlonal running variable. Some computational results are presented for the synmetric case.