Dynamic and control issues of formation flight

Two aspects of formation flight are addressed in this paper: dynamic modeling and formation control. In formation flight aircraft dynamics are coupled by aerodynamic effects due to the vortices leaving the lifting surfaces, such as changes in lift and drag forces and lateral/directional effects that do not appear in a steady-level ‘isolated’ flight. These aerodynamic effects are properly modeled with a three dimensional code based on a Distributed Horse-Shoe Technique. A formation controller allowing both trajectory tracking and formation geometry keeping is then designed. It is shown that the designed controller yields satisfactory performance in a two-aircraft formation.