Development of a control law to improve the handling qualities for short-range air-to-air combat maneuvers

Abstract

Modern fighter aircraft have been designed to have high maneuverability in order to preoccupy strategic superiority in short-range air-to-air combat between fighter aircraft in warfare. Digital fly-by-wire flight control system design is aimed at providing good handling qualities for all mission task elements over the entire flight envelope. To provide both excellent gross acquisition and fine tracking compatibility, simultaneously for air-to-air combat maneuvers, this article presents a common longitudinal control law design of a task-dependent self-adjusting command-path pilot prefilter gain scheduler within the same control law design architecture and response type based on nonlinear dynamic inversion control. We perform the frequency- and time-domain analyses based on the mathematical model of T-50 advanced trainer aircraft to evaluate the basic flying qualities of the proposed control method. Furthermore, the pilot evaluation is performed to evaluate the gross acquisition and fine tracking capability for air-to-air tracking maneuvers in a handling quality simulator. The evaluation results reveal that the proposed control method improves the fine tracking capability without the degradation of gross acquisition.