Abstract High performance aircraft of the future will be designed lighter, more maneuverable, and operate over an ever expanding flight envelope. One of the largest differences from the flight control perspective between current and future advanced aircraft is elasticity. Over the last decade, dynamic inversion methodology has gained considerable popularity in application to highly maneuverable...

The majority of fatal aircraft accidents are associated with ‘loss-of-control’. Yet the notion of loss-of-control is not well-defined in terms suitable for rigorous control systems analysis. Loss-of-control is generally associated with flight outside of the normal flight envelope, with nonlinear influences, and with an inability of the pilot to control the aircraft. The two primary sources of n...

In the present paper, an efficient method for three dimensional aircraft pattern recognition is introduced. In this method, a set of simple area based features extracted from silhouette of aerial vehicles are used to recognize an aircraft type from its optical or infrared images taken by a CCD camera or a FLIR sensor. These images can be taken from any direction and distance relative to the fly...

The continued development of sophisticated aircraft with high fidelity control systems will enable autonomous execution of challenging tasks such as aerial refueling and close formation flight. In order to achieve such tasks in autonomous flight, an aircraft must sense other aircraft in close proximity and position itself relative to them. For example, aerial refueling requires the follower air...