Computer simulations and even ground hardware tests can supplement flight testing.

A program of research has addressed a methodology of scaling of flight tests of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) intended primarily for military use in observing and/or attacking targets on the ground. The main goal of this research is to make it possible to design a model UAV that is suitable for evaluating the performance of a given real UAV or family of UAVs. This research also demonstrates the use of results of computational simulations and ground hardware experiments on models of vehicles other than UAVs to predict performances of UAVs prior to conducting flight tests.

Two Surrogate Vehicles — one much slower and one much faster than a nominal UAV — were analyzed along with the UAV in a computational simulation to study the possibility and effects of scaling of vehicle dynamics and sensor behavior.