Challenges and Innovations in Aircraft Flight Control

Dear Colleagues,

Recent years have seen a rise in the aircraft performance, safety, and autonomy requirements for both crewed and uncrewed aircraft. This is creating new flight control challenges for different classes of aircraft. Civilian airliners are evolving towards increasing their levels of automation, but this is creating flight control safety challenges. Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have also evolved with an unprecedented variety in their designs. Aircraft control systems are also increasingly required to save energy and reduce emissions, particularly in the case of electric aircraft, including urban air mobility.

In this Special Issue, particular prominence will be given to the development of estimation and control methods and algorithms for:

- Fault tolerant aircraft control systems under sensor and actuator faults;

- Optimal aircraft control allocation using multiple actuators;

- Flight envelope protection for enhanced flight safety;

- Optimal aircraft control problems of practical significance, including energy optimality, optimal tradeoffs, time optimality, and optimal coverage path planning;

- Adaptive flight control to handle aircraft parameter variations;

- Aircraft state, fault, disturbance, and model uncertainty estimation using advances in observers, Kalman filters, and other estimation methods;

- Advances in aircraft robust control;

- Hybrid (combined continuous and discrete time) control approaches for flight profiles with multiple flight modes;

- Artificial intelligence in flight control;

- Advances in the control of hybrid (cruise and VTOL) aircraft configurations;

- Combining open-loop and closed-loop aircraft control systems;

- Advances in autonomous and full authority flight control systems.

Review, theoretical, simulation-based, and practical-type papers are all within the scope of this Special Issue. All aircraft types are also within the scope of this Special Issue.

Dr. Nadjim Horri
Dr. Toufik Souanef
Guest Editors

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