Monitoring flight control laws

Flight control laws are becoming increasingly complex, and the risk of potential development errors is increasing accordingly. Today, reliance is mainly based on rigorous development assurance processes which have been developed and applied to establish confidence that the control law development has been accomplished in a sufficiently disciplined manner, to limit the likelihood of development errors that could have an impact on aircraft safety.

However, development assurance can only minimise the system development risk. An additional difficulty is that errors may remain latent until they manifest themselves in a failure.

As flight control laws contain highly complex functionalities, having dissimilar control laws to compare and address the integrity aspect and detect effects of errors is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to achieve.

The project aims to investigate the introduction of flight control law monitors to detect the effects of development errors. It will improve the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certification standards and will support the evaluation of new designs proposed by aircraft manufacturers.

This project is funded from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.