Aircraft performance enhancement by integrating the propulsion control system with the primary flight control system is demonstrated through two nonlinear flight control design examples. In the first example, high performance aircraft turning performance improvement using engine thrust modulation is demonstrated. In the second example, the flight propulsion system integration is used to achieve...

The purpose of this communication is to investigate the usefulness of the differential flatness control approach to solve the trajectory tracking problem for a four rotor aircraft. After introducing simplifying assumptions, the flight dynamics equations for the four rotor aircraft are considered. A trajectory tracking control structure based on a two layer non linear approach is then proposed. ...

The vertical stabilizer is a primary aerodynamic surface responsible for providing directional stability of an aircraft. Directional stability is further augmented by the yaw damping capability of the rudder using feedback control. When the rudder experiences faults or the vertical stabilizer is damaged, directional stability of an aircraft will be compromised. In the worst-case scenario, the v...

Surface and hardware failure affect the flight control system of the F-16 fighter aircraft. In the absence of failures and unpredictable changes. the controller, based on gain scheduling performs very well and exhibits a good degree of robustness, even for high angles of attack. In order to accommodate for possible failures and maintain good performance characteristics, the contro...

Several safety devices have filled in the vacuous spaces in commercial airplanes which once did not possess such sophisticated mechanisms. Commercial airplanes have copious amount of instruments and electrical circuits to provide a proper control system inside the plane. A noteworthy invention in the early 80’s is the oxygen masks provided for every passenger during a plane crash or if the airp...

There are many features to take into consideration when designing servoed vision systems especially when redundant degrees-of-freedom (DOF) are present. Motion platforms mounted with camera systems usually have multiple joints. Example platforms include rovers, booms, gantries, aircrafts and submersibles. Teleoperating such systems to track moving objects is particularly challenging. The operat...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for aircraft taking off control in wind shear, which is a challenging issue for an aircraft. Design/methodology/approach – Aircraft control in wind shear needs an anti-jamming controller. Symbolic control is an effective and adaptive method for complex dynamic system. In this paper, wind shear flight control laws are developed for th...

An aircraft is said to be operated in a trim condition when the body axis accelerations are zero. In other words, no resultant forces or torque act on the aircraft. The purpose of the longitudinal controller of an aircraft is to help pilots to move the aircraft from one trim condition to another, or to stabilize the aircraft in an operating trim condition while the aircraft is subjected to dist...

We study robust hovering control of vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) aircraft. For hovering control, we can model a V/STOL aircraft as a planar vertical takeoff and landing (PVTOL) aircraft. We use a recently developed optimal control approach to design a robust hovering control. The resulting control is a nonlinear state feedback whose robustness is demonstrated by numerical simulat...

An analysis was conducted to examine the market visibility of small aircraft as a transportation mode in competition with automobile and scheduled commercial air travel by estimating the pool of users that would potentially switch on-demand air travel due to cost/time saving. These new aircraft greatly increase the practicality of regional aircraft as a transportation mode that can avoid the co...