Flight Simulation Software

4 Flight Control Systems

It wasn’t that the X-1 would kill you, it was the systems in the X-1 that would kill you.

Chuck Yeager

4.1 Automatic Flight Control

A flight control system (FCS) in an aircraft is designed to improve the accuracy of navigation, to reduce pilot workload and to increase the overall safety of aircraft operations. A risk analysis is undertaken for all avionic equipment, including the FCS, where the likelihood of failure of the FCS is extremely low. If the FCS should fail, its impact either must be contained (often by means of duplicated redundant systems) or, alternatively, the flight crew must be able to identify a failed system and switch it out without endangering the aircraft. Consequently, an aircraft FCS is relatively simple in terms of design, to ensure the high degree of reliability required for the certification process.

Although an FCS in a flight simulator does not need to meet the same level of reliability, it must correctly replicate the behaviour of the equivalent FCS in all regimes of flight. Often, the data package for a flight simulator may contain the diagrams and details of the actual control systems used in the aircraft. However, if such data is not available, the simulator designer is required to implement these control functions to fully replicate the range of autonomous modes of the aircraft.

Students faced with the design of control systems are confronted with a plethora of control system design methods (Franklin et al., 1994), ...