NASA´s advanced control law program for the F-8 digital fly-by-wire aircraft

This paper briefly describes the NASA F-8 Digital Fly-By-Wire (DFBW) program and Langley Research Center´s role in investigating and promoting advanced control laws for possible flight experimentation. The primary purpose of the paper is to provide background material for papers describing some of the F-8 DFBW adaptive control law studies. The paper provides a brief description of the Phase II DFBW F-8 aircraft and its control system, discusses some of the advanced control law study objectives and guidelines, and provides some mathematical models which are useful in the control analysis problem.