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Eurofighter: The New Challenge of Collaboration in Military Aerospace
Published in Philip Lawrence, Derek Braddon, Strategic Issues in European Aerospace, 2017
Air Vice-Marshal Peter Norriss
By design, Eurofighter is an aerodynamically unstable aircraft. To enable the pilot to control the aircraft, stability is provided by an active, computerised, flight control system. With this design, the quality and integrity of the flight control system is of critical importance. Consequently, it has been necessary to take a cautious, incremental, approach to the development and clearance of the system. The flight control system also has other advanced features such as tailored control response, automatic alleviation from the effects of gusts and automatic protection against loss of control. The flight control system has operated successfully during all of the flight trials carried out to date, and pilots have praised the excellent handling qualities of the aircraft. The next phase of flight trials will demonstrate the carefree manoeuvre capability of the aircraft.
Unmanned Aircraft System Design
Published in R. Kurt Barnhart, Douglas M. Marshall, Eric J. Shappee, Introduction to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 2021
For the UAS that is not flown in RC mode or stability-augmented RC mode, a flight control system (often referred to as an autopilot, which is the term that will be used here) is employed to control the aircraft. The autopilot system is typically composed of a microprocessor or computer that runs algorithms designed to control the aircraft over a preplanned flight path. It is also used to augment control of the aircraft that is receiving steering commands (commands not associated with maintaining stability, such as heading changes) from a remotely located pilot. Typically, an inner control loop receives high-frequency sensor data to manage the aircraft attitude, while an outer-loop controller manages the aircraft position while following a flight plan.
Take-off
Published in Sulfikar Amir, The Technological State in Indonesia, 2012
In a nutshell, fly-by-wire is a flight control system that provides fully powered, electrically controlled hydraulic servos both for primary and secondary control surfaces of an airplane. In the N250, the fly-by-wire control system covers three axes: directional, lateral, and longitudinal. The motion of the airplane towards these axes is determined by the control surfaces consisting of one rudder for yaw directional control, two ailerons for roll control, two elevators for pitch control, four flap panels for taking off and landing, and four spoiler panels for roll control supplementing ailerons (see Figure 6.1). Nine small computers called the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) were installed in the aircraft. Except for the flaps, each surface was connected to two units of ECU. These computers functioned to transfer commands from the pilot to the surfaces. Thus, the pilot no longer controls the airplane motion manually through mechanical links as commonly used in conventional flight control systems. Every command from the pilot is processed digitally by the computers and transmitted to the surfaces in real time. The utilization of fly-by-wire in the N250 gave two distinct advantages, making the N250 superior to other aircraft in its class. First, it greatly reduced the aircraft’s weight because metal components used in mechanical control system such as rods, interconnection units, cranks, and so forth are now replaced by wires. By reducing its weight, the fly-by-wire enhanced the plane’s speed. Equally important is that the use of computers enhanced flight smoothness. The computers were programmed not only to receive inputs from the pilot, but also to manipulate the inputs based on a mathematical model so as to enhance the quality of flight. The outputs from the computer were electronically sent to actuators linked to control surfaces. To maintain the sensitivity of controlling the aircraft for the pilot, the interface between the pilot and the N250
Control parameter tuning for aircraft crosswind landing via multi-solution particle swarm optimization
Published in Engineering Optimization, 2018
Qi Bian, Brett Nener, Xinmin Wang
In Figure 1, and are the lateral deviation command and error, respectively; and and are the deflection of the aileron and rudder, respectively. To reduce the lateral deviation caused by crosswinds, the flight control system should take full advantage of the information from both the rudder channel and the aileron channel. Thus, a coupled flight control structure is presented to make sure that adequate control information is exchanged between the two channels. As a result, the flight control system is able to automatically keep the aircraft level and reduce the lateral deviation caused by the crosswind as much as possible.