Development of a flight control system for an ultralight airplane

This paper presents development of the hardware and software for the low cost avionic system of ultralight airplanes. There are shown three levels of a hardware and software system design. As far as the software is concerned, we focused on changeover from non real-time operating system (embedded Linux) to the real-time embedded platform (QNX). We discussed the problems that led to operating system change. Various advantages and disadvantages of both operating systems are presented in this contribution. Concerning the hardware we concentrated on the development of the avionic control, monitoring and display modules that are a components of the dash board. The paper has been focusing on safety and reliability in the ultralight aviation and what can be improved or extended by the real-time operating system.