A conditioning strategy for performance improvement of an integrated flight and propulsion control system for a V/STOL aircraft

This paper presents a conditioning strategy which is applied to a linear integrated flight and propulsion control system for an experimental vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) concept aircraft in the transition (approach to hover) region of the flight envelope. The proposed strategy incorporates an output conditioning scheme to ensure satisfaction of safety critical engine variables and combines this with an actuator linearisation scheme to explicitly prioritise flight path angle over velocity in the case of engine performance limitations being reached. Performance and safety improvements due to the addition of the controller conditioning scheme are demonstrated in non-linear simulation.