Towards Automatic Flight Control for Commercial Airliners in Formation Flight

Ride comfort in commercial aircraft during formation flight using conventional flight control

“…The study by Büchner [4] A paper by Kubica et al at Aerospatiale Matra Airbus [11] reported that experience in the design of flight control laws for aircraft such as the A320 and A330/340, showed that flight mechanic modes are located at frequencies below 1 Hz, the region affecting motion sickness.…”

“…This led to another study, performed by Büchner [4] at Stellenbosch University (SUN), who investigated automatic flight control of modern-day commercial transport aircraft during formation flight. This work served as the first contribution in the field of flight control systems during formation flight, with the aim of evaluating the stability and performance of newly designed flight control systems for formation flight requirements.…”

“…To model, design, implement and verify the working of a representative conventional flyby-wire flight control architecture with outer-loop guidance laws. 4. To develop a formation-extended Boeing 747-100 aircraft model, that will include the aerodynamic effects of trailing vortices of the leader on the trailing airliner, and will be used by the follower aircraft in a dynamic formation flight simulation.…”

“…A previous study by Büchner [4] investigated the dynamic simulation of formation flight with automatic flight control, but did not evaluate the ride comfort in the aircraft. The author revealed two formation flight regions where the aircraft could be trimmed with conventional straight and level flight trim settings, and still achieve drag savings relative to the conventional isolated aircraft.…”

“…The ride comfort experienced by passengers in the follower aircraft of a two-ship right echelon extended formation will be evaluated with the flight dynamics and the effects of the compensatory flight control inputs taken into account. This thesis also aims to improve upon the control architecture of Büchner [4], and in so doing, obtain realistic aircraft responses during formation flight. With limited access to Airbus proprietary information, an Airbus A330 aircraft fly-by-wire architecture is used to model representative flyby-wire flight control systems in this study.…”