TABLE OF CONTENTS Experiment design involves determining which physical quantities will be measured, how those quantities will be measured, what the test conditions will be, and how the system being studied will be excited. For aircraft system identification, this translates into specifying the instrumentation and data acquisition system, selecting the aircraft configurations and flight conditions, and designing inputs for the maneuvers. These issues are the topics of this chapter.
The goal of experiment design is to maximize the information content in the data, subject to practical constraints. Some examples of practical constraints are
limits on input and/or output amplitudes, e.g., to ensure that a linear model structure can be used to estimate parameters from the measured data;
limited resolution or range for the sensors or data acquisition system;
hardware or telemetry limitations restricting the rate at which data can be measured or the number of physical quantities that can be measured at an acceptable rate;
limited time available for each maneuver and/or for the overall experimental investigation;
sensor limitations, characteristics, or availability;
limitations on how the aircraft can be excited, e.g., control surface rate or position limits, or the requirement for a continuously operating feedback control system when the aircraft is open-loop unstable.
As discussed in Chapter 3, inputs for modeling aircraft open-loop or bareairframe dynamics are the control surface deflections. Outputs are air-relative velocity data ( V, a, ?), body-axis angular velocities ( P, q, r), Euler attitude angles ( 
, ?
