Proposals for air traffic management such as Free Flight call for a transfer of responsibility for separation between aircraft from air traffic controllers (ATCos) to pilots. Under many proposals, the role of the ATCo will change from one of active control to passive monitoring. The present study directly compared these types of control with respect to ATCo mental workload, conflict detection, ...

A novel MATLAB/Simulink based modeling and simulation environment for the design and rapid prototyping of state-of-the-art aircraft control systems is proposed. The toolbox, named APRICOT, is able to simulate the longitudinal and laterodirectional dynamics of an aircraft separately, as well as the complete 6 degrees of freedom dynamics. All details of the dynamics can be easily customized in th...

The paper presents the automatic control of aircraft in longitudinal plane, during landing, by using the linearized dynamics of aircraft, taking into consideration the sensor errors and other external disturbances. Aircraft auto-landing is achieved by combining two control techniques: H2 and H∞ approaches; this way, a robust H2/H∞ controller is obtained. Within the robust H2/H∞ controller, the ...

The Aircraft Morphing Program at NASA Langley Research Center explores opportunities to improve airframe designs with smart technologies. Two elements of this basic research program are multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) and advanced flow control. This paper describes examples where MDO techniques such as sensitivity analysis, automatic differentiation, and genetic algorithms contribut...

This thesis considers the problem of intersecting aircraft flows under decentralized conflict avoidance rules. Using an Eulerian standpoint (aircraft flow through a fixed control volume), new air traffic control models and scenarios are defined that enable the study of long-term airspace stability problems. Considering a class of two intersecting aircraft flows, it is shown that airspace stabil...

This paper presents an approach for realizing a phase difference measurement of a new gyro. A silicon micromachined gyro was mounted on rotating aircraft for aircraft attitude control. Aircraft spin drives the silicon pendulum of a gyro rotating at a high speed so that it can sense the transverse angular velocity of the rotating aircraft based on the gyroscopic precession principle when the air...

This paper presents a net-centric communication, command, and control architecture for a heterogeneous unmanned aircraft system comprised of small and miniature unmanned aircraft. An integrated system was developed using a bottomup design approach to reflect and enhance the interplay between networked communication and autonomous aircraft coordination. The advantages of the approach are demonst...

In this paper, the problem of structural damage with partial loss vertical tail in aircraft dynamical system is investigated. A linearized aircraft model is introduced firstly, then a damage-tolerant controller based on an adaptive sliding mode control is proposed. Finally, simulations with an aircraft model are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed design te...

This paper focuses on the development of a wind gust load alleviation control system for implementation in very flexible aircraft. The gust load alleviation system is designed using Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control techniques, and it is based on a nonlinear model of the coupled rigid-body and elastic modes of a very flexible aircraft. The nonlinear model contains the dynamics of the airc...

The noise levels in the passenger cabin of turbopropeller-driven aircraft are typically higher than the noise levels in comparable turbofan-powered aircraft. The sources of noise in a turboprop aircraft include boundary layer flow noise, structure-borne noise due to engine vibration, and acoustic excitation of the fuselage due to the propeller, with the latter being dominant for most turboprop ...