S P Govinda Raju is a Professor at the Aerospace Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His interests are fluid mechanics, aircraft design, testing and analysis.

The current interest is on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV’s) as they have considerable potential for economically performing many tasks which are currently in the domain of manned vehicles. For some years now such vehicles have been in use for aerial observation and as communication relays. There is much effort worldwide in developing such vehicles for limited combat duties as well. Quite apart from this line of development, such vehicles have been used for supporting design and development of flight vehicles. Scaled models of aircraft were used in the early seventies in studying the post stall behaviour of F-15 airplane. It is understood that instrumented flights of scaled models of aircraft like the MIG 29 and Su 27 were extensively used during their development. These developments were possible because of extensive developments in computers, sensors, instrumentation, telemetry and other related techniques during the last few decades. These developments have rapidly advanced further in recent times and it is now possible to conduct research using unmanned flight models of relatively small size. Costs involved in such studies are two to three orders of magnitude lower than for studies using manned vehicles. Because of this, academics with very limited resources can now consider using tiny aircraft for research purposes. It is in this context that a program of flight research has been underway at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in the last few years. The emphasis of this program has been on the flight mechanics aspects of combat aircraft configurations while control and guidance aspects are also receiving some attention.

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Address for Correspondence

S P Govinda Raju
Aerospace Engineering Department
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore 560 012, India.