This program calculates the Time Safety Margin (TSM) in seconds and the Recovery Alitude Delta (RAD) in feet for a diving aircraft in accordance with US Air Force Flight Test Center Instruction. This information is used by flight test organizations to identify the risk of a test point and determine the amount of additional planning and training required to perform that test.

The TSM is the time in seconds before an aircraft reaches an unrecoverable condition. The RAD is the vertical distance the aircraft will take to obtain a level flight condition.

To compute TSM, the user enters the following defaults into the default page:
Available recovery Nz, Nz Onset, roll rate, pilot delay, and ground elevation.

In addition the following aircraft parameters are entered: airspeed, altitude, bank angle, and dive angle. Airspeed can be enter either as a Mach # or Knots Calibrated Airspeed (KCAS).

Output includes the true airspeed, initial vertical velocity, recovery altitude delta, and the TSM.

This program is purely physics based and does not account for specific aircraft thrust or drag effects. It also assumes true airspeed is constant throughout the dive and dive recovery.

All data are based on the US Standard Atmosphere of 1976 and are accurate for both subsonic and supersonic flight conditions and to about 284,000 feet geometric altitude.

This program is dedicated to the memory of David "Cools" Cooley who died flight testing a F-22 on March 25, 2009.