Author Description

The United States Air Force has advanced fighter aircraft that lose the ability to operate in a large portion of their operating flight envelope when an air data system failure is experienced. These aircraft are reverted to a fixed set of standby-gains that limit their maneuverability, degrade handling qualities, and increase susceptibility to departure. The purpose of this research was to determine if three alternative methods of standby-gain-scheduling could provide robust control with minimal performance degradation despite the lack of air data. To accomplish this, three methods of standby-gain-scheduling were developed, integrated, and tested in the Infinity Cube simulator at the Air Force Research Laboratory/RBCD building. The first method improved upon an algorithm which used inertial data to estimate an aircrafts true velocity used to drive the gains in an F-16 controller. This algorithm was validated by post-processing high-fidelity simulator data and actual flight data. The second method simply used inertial velocities to drive the gains in an F-16 controller.