High-Sideslip Model Reference Adaptive Flight Control for Aileron Locked Aircraft

This paper develops a high-sideslip flight control scheme based on model reference adaptive control (MRAC) to stabilize aircraft under aileron deadlock of one side. Firstly, the cascaded flight control scheme for high-sideslip straight flight is presented and how the control signals transfer is also analyzed. After that, the control structure and laws of MRAC for attitude inner-loop connected with sideslip command are designed. Finally, the control scheme is verified under a nonlinear aircraft model in conditions of no fault and one side aileron deadlock respectively. The simulation results show that when one side aileron deadlock occurs in accompany with the plant’s aerodynamic data perturbation and random initialization of controller parameters, this control method could utilize operation points of no-fault aircraft to force the faulty aircraft following the given reference model responses and finally tracking given sideslip angle command without static error robustly.