Programme
From 2004-2008, a research group on Fault Tolerant Flight Control, comprising a collaboration
of thirteen European partners from industry, universities and research institutions,
was established within the framework of the Group for Aeronautical Research and Technology
in Europe (GARTEUR) co-operation program. The research group, Flight Mechanics Action
Group FM-AG(16), demonstrated the capability and potential of innovative reconfigurable
flight control algorithms to improve aircraft survivability. The group facilitated
the proliferation of new developments in fault tolerant flight control design within
the European aerospace research community towards practical and real-time operational
applications. This addressed the need to improve the resilience and safety of future
commercial aircraft and aid the pilot to recover from adverse (upset) conditions
induced by (multiple) system failures and damage that would otherwise be potentially
catastrophic.
Up till now, faults or damage on board of aircraft have been accommodated by hardware
design using duplex, triplex or even quadruplex redundancy of critical components.
The approach of the GARTEUR research focussed on providing redundancy by means of
new adaptive control law design methods to accommodate (unanticipated) faults and/or
damage that dramatically change the configuration of the aircraft. These methods
take into account a novel combination of robustness, reconfiguration and (real-time)
adaptation of the control laws.
The potential of the developed fault tolerant flight control methods to improve aircraft
survivability, for both manual and automatic flight, has been demonstrated within
the GARTEUR programme during a piloted assessment in the SIMONA Research Flight Simulator
of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The assessment was conducted
using unique high-fidelity non-linear simulation models based on realistic failure
scenarios that were validated against accident flight data.
GARTEUR FM-AG(16) Fault Tolerant Control group, Delft, the Netherlands
