22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-6.9.R1

FLYING QUALITIES DESIGN FOR A FLY-BY-WIRE TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT IN THE LANDING FLIGHT PHASE

J. Gautrey
College of Aeronautics, Cranfield University, UK

Keywords: fly-by-wire, transport aircraft, control systems

Fly-by-wire flight control systems are becoming more common in both civil and military aircraft. These systems can give many benefits but present a new set of problems, especially as they may drastically influence the pilot's perception of the aircraft's flying characteristics, compared with those of a classical transport aircraft. The paper presented here considers an approach to the design of fly-by-wire control laws for a generic regional transport aircraft. An approach is described where flying qualities data obtained from past flying qualities studies was analysed, and a number of flying qualities requirements are formulated for the approach and landing flying qualities task for a transport aircraft. A number of different fly-by-wire control laws were designed using the design criteria derived from this data to provide a range of flying qualities characteristics which are representative of flyby- wire transport aircraft currently in service. These control laws were then evaluated with an ILS approach task to determine which was the most suitable control law. Pilot in the loop simulation was used in a fixed base engineering flight simulator for this purpose. The results showed that the requirements could be used to design a number of different, but otherwise satisfactory, types of control law for the approach and landing task.

view full paper