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The performance and flight characteristics of an aircraft are markedly affected by the aerodynamic design, which can be done making use of various tools such as wind tunnel tests and computer simulations. Despite the fact that wind tunnel testing permits great trustworthiness of results, they are still slow and costly procedures. On the other hand, computational methods allow for faster and lower budget analysis. For the conception and the initial phase of an aircraft design, where it is necessary to evaluate a great variety of wings and lifting surfaces configurations, it is desirable to have a method able to determine the main aerodynamic characteristics, such as drag and lift, quickly. In more advanced phases of the design the interest is in obtaining results which shows a more detailed flow around the aircraft.

Recently, the development of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) has been an important activity in Brazilian Aerospace Research Centers and Universities. The major of these enforcements has been focused in the development of medium size UAV's for aerial reconnaissance. Particularly, the CEA-UFMG, start an effort in order to develop a small size UAV (SUAV) able to execute aerial reconnaissance of small areas. This work present the most important phases of the development process of this SUAV. For the construction of computational models for the flight dynamic simulation and the calculation of aerodynamics characteristics of aerial platform several in-house developed codes was used. With these computational tools became possible to design the guidance and automatic control strategies. Initially the strategies were developed for each motion in separated, and finally they are grouped for test ant tune in the 6DOF simulator. Details of embedded hardware and software are presented.

To attend the next generation of aircraft, which will demand higher levels of crashworthiness performance and occupant safety, the development and validation of reliable simulation tools is a very important task. Through efficient use of finite element simulation technologies, development costs and certification tests can be reduced, while meeting aircraft safety and crashworthiness requirements. The present work presents an overview of aircraft crash and occupant simulation, highlights selected topics of the finite element crash technology, review recent applications, and identify future challenges of the technology.

This paper present the instrumentation procedure used in order to determine the performance, stability and control characteristics of the light aircraft CEA-205 CB-9 Curumim. The instrumentation used is: i) autonomous acquisition system using micro controllers; ii) solid state inertial platform; iii) pitot probe; iv) attack and sideslip angle indicators; v) potentiometer on control system; vi) load cell on control system; vii) propeller tachometer; viii) barometer; ix) thermometer and x) GPS. Assembly and calibration detail procedures are presented with some results obtained on typical maneuvers. This work, in development on the Center for Aeronautical Studies of Federal University of Minas Gerais (CEA/UFMG) and on the Department of Aeronautical Engineering of Naples University (DPA), intend to assembly a system in order to perform low cost flight tests on light aircrafts.