Two general methods for calculating the aircraft equivalent singly vulnerable area

Two general methods are proposed to calculate the aircraft equivalent singly vulnerable area. One is called the Monte Carlo simulation based method, and the other is called the aircraft multiple hit vulnerability based method. The Monte Carlo simulation method compares all the aircraft's unique existent states to a "model of filling boxes with balls," and by randomly and uniformly sampling the threat hit locations, the expected number of hits on the vulnerable area required to kill an aircraft E_AV can be attained. In the second method, E_AV is obtained using the cumulated kill probability of an aircraft subjected to multiple threat hits. After getting the E_AV, the aircraft equivalent singly vulnerable area can be calculated. Four examples demonstrate the correctness and feasibility of the two general methods. Analysis shows that the developed methods overcome the shortcomings of currently used methods in that these methods can deal with the calculation of an aircraft equivalent singly vulnerable area for the case in which 1) the aircraft may have several sets of multiply vulnerable components, and the multiply vulnerable components of each set do not always have the same vulnerable area, and 2) the aircraft vulnerable components can overlap in any arbitrary manor.