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This paper proposes an approach to formulation and integration of the governing equations for aircraft flight simulation that is based on a Lie group setting, and leads to a nonsingular coordinate-free numerical integration. Dynamical model of an aircraft is formulated in Lie group state space form and integrated by ordinary-differential-equation (ODE)-on-Lie groups Munthe-Kaas (MK) type of integrator. By following such an approach, it is assured that kinematic singularities, which are unavoidable if a three-angles-based rotation parameterization is applied for the whole 3D rotation domain, do not occur in the proposed noncoordinate formulation form. Moreover, in contrast to the quaternion rotation parameterization that imposes additional algebraic constraint and leads to integration of differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) (with necessary algebraic-equation-violation stabilization step), the proposed formulation leads to a nonredundant ODE integration in minimal form. To this end, this approach combines benefits of both traditional approaches to aircraft simulation (i.e., three angles parameterization and quaternions), while at the same time it avoids related drawbacks of the classical models. Besides solving kinematic singularity problem without introducing DAEs, the proposed formulation also exhibits numerical advantages in terms of better accuracy when longer integration steps are applied during simulation and when aircraft motion pattern comprises steady rotational component of its 3D motion. This is due to the fact that a Lie group setting and applied MK integrator determine vehicle orientation on the basis of integration of local (tangent, nonlinear) kinematical differential equations (KDEs) that model process of 3D rotations (i.e., vehicle attitude reconstruction on nonlinear manifold SO(3)) more accurately than “global” KDEs of the classical formulations (that are linear in differential equations part in the case of standard quaternion models).

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