Monitoring of flight control laws

The objectives

The project aims to investigate the introduction of flight control law monitors to detect errors. It will improve the EASA certification standards, and will support the evaluation of new designs proposed by aircraft manufacturers.

The project addresses several key main challenges for the use of multiple monitors:

  • the detection is effective when the detection means are sufficiently independent from the item being monitored;
  • the independent monitoring needs to be designed with thresholds and confirmation times set not so high as to not trigger when not needed, and also not so low as to lead to spurious detections; and
  • it may be difficult from monitoring the aircraft behaviour to determine whether the aircraft response comes from a flight control law error, a normal behaviour in a given phase of the flight, and/or an external perturbation.
     

The main tasks and deliverables

The project tasks include the definition of a simulation environment for the flight control system of a large aeroplane, and an evaluation of the proposed solutions both in terms of effectiveness and robustness to situations (e.g. manoeuvres, environment) and in respect of the required effort for their implementation.

Several technical workshops for Stakeholders (e.g. manufacturing industries, research centers) will be organised to present the project objectives and results as well as invite them to share their comments.