Auto-landing Fault-Tolerant Control System Design for a Light Aircraft

In the aircraft crash statistics reports, light aircraft crashes, even at present, have a wide coverage as a consequence of control surface faults such as jamming, hard-over, or loss of effectiveness. In order to prevent such catastrophic consequences, a fault-tolerant control system with a domain-specific fault detection and isolation process is proposed. What makes the fault detection and isolation process domain-specific takes source from light aircraft’s flight dynamics characteristics. Light aircraft, whose control systems are reversible, have their specific properties, which must be considered in terms of flight dynamics and control, such as control surface dynamics while a stick-free flight. In this study, a hybrid control system is proposed, in which the main control system is the conventional reversible control system, and the other control system is a fault-tolerant control system which is activated in case of a fault, as a pilot support system. Furthermore, a simple and effective fault detection and isolation process based on the stick-free flight characteristics of a light aircraft is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed control architecture is demonstrated under rudder jam/hard-over, and the aileron and rudder loss of effectiveness fault conditions with strong lateral gust while the aircraft is in the landing phase. As a consequence of the study, the proposed control architecture successfully makes the aircraft land on the runway.