Estimation of wind from airplane states in coordinated flight

A filter is defined that extracts the wind aloft from the Earth velocity and the orientation of a night vehicle in coordinated flight (data that are available in the context of distributed interactive simulation). A convergence theorem is proved stating that the estimated wind monotonically approaches the true wind when the latter is horizontal and constant. The filter builds the transverse component of the wind and converges to the full wind as the night vehicle changes heading. The fastest convergence occurs when the filter is applied at heading intervals equal to a critical interval that depends on the bank.