Use of Fiber Optics in Digital Automatic Flight Control Systems

The availability of digital MSI and LSI has made digital flight control systems more cost effective than analog systems for all but the simplest systems. The organization of a digital flight control system is concerned not only with implementation of the control laws and associated logic but also with the management of the data used in these computations and the organization of the computation. The configuration taken by a digital flight control system is dominated by the integrity and data handling requirements. This paper considers the impact of these factors on the design and operation of digital flight control systems with particular emphasis on the use of fiber optics for transmission of data between lanes.