An Analysis of Decision Criteria for the Selection of Military Training Aircrafts

The Spanish Minister of Defense needs to replace the current military training aircrafts by other models to meet current training needs in the Spanish Air Force Academy. In order to know the main features that the candidate aircrafts should have, there is a need to take into account the knowledge and experience of experts in this specific field, such as trained test pilots and flight instructors. In this way, it will be possible to recognize the main technical criteria to consider. This study shows a case study that allowed obtaining not only the preferences of an expert’s group, but also the importance of the considered criteria. Given that the criteria information provided by the experts has different nature, with qualitative criteria (human factors, flying and handling qualities, etc.) coexisting with quantitative criteria (service ceiling, stalling speed, endurance, etc.), the joint use of linguistic labels and numerical values is needed. Therefore, a survey focused on the fuzzy AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) methodology is proposed to extract the knowledge from the experts group and finally obtain a unique set of weights for the criteria.