Simulation and Prototyping of FCS for Sport Aircraft

Light Sport Aircraft, Assisting Flight Control System, Simulations, Prototyping, Hardware-in-the-Loop 

The workload experienced by the pilots while operating and navigating an airplane in areas with dense air traffic, magnified by the complexity of meteorological phenomena and physiological limitations of manned flight support the rationality of a pilot workload reducing system. As LSAs (Light Sport Aircraft) are mostly flown by a single pilot, their operational concept would benefit from an intelligent flight control system assisting in aircrafts safe operation. This opinion motivated the authors to an experimental implementation of assisting flight control strategies. Proposed flight control concept for LSA integrates mechanical and digital control systems in a synergic way, allowing flight safety and comfort improvements by maintaining or augmenting overall system reliability and improving user experience in manual flying. The concept of an assisting flight control system is an intermediate step between manual and fly-by-wire control, making it a viable option for installations on board of price sensitive light sport aircraft. Presented paper describes the simulation and prototyping of control algorithms for an assisting flight control and navigation system. The applied control strategy uses classical control theory along with implementation of flight envelope protection features. The proposed flight control system was subjected to real-time and pilot-in-the-loop experiments in a light aircraft simulation lab SimStar.