A Novel Design Approach for Low Speed Recovery of High Performance Fighter Aircraft

Abstract

In this paper, a novel design approach for low-speed recovery of a high-performance fighter aircraft is presented. It is shown that the phugoid mode has an important bearing on the problem of low-speed departure. Based on the analysis of the phugoid mode trajectories, a novel low-speed protection algorithm is presented in this paper. The proposed low speed recovery is achieved in three phases. The first phase consists of detecting the incipient departure followed in the second phase by the application of suitable recovery controls and finally the third phase ends with the transfer of controls to the pilot. The design of the first and the third phase consist of choosing the correct trigger conditions which ensures safe recovery of the aircraft in all conditions. The proposed Automatic low speed recovery is triggered when the aircraft trajectory crosses a fixed boundary in the region spanned by the dynamic pressure and its rate of decrease. It is observed that this boundary is approximately a straight line, implying that it is equivalent to a forward prediction in time to indicate when the aircraft will reach the lowest controllable airspeed. This Automatic Low Speed Recovery with Forward Prediction (ALSR-FP) algorithm is found to be simpler than other existing design methods and effective in preventing low speed departure for a variety of pilot inputs that result in the aircraft losing airspeed leading to stall. In the second phase control inputs are chosen to align the velocity vector to the direction of local gravity. The recovery phase is considered complete after the aircraft reaches the dynamic pressure which is approximately 10 % higher than the minimum dynamic pressure for control. Performance of the ALSR-FP is demonstrated using the high-performance fighter aircraft ADMIRE model which has a delta wing configuration, canards and multiple redundant controls. It is also shown that the proposed algorithm can be easily implemented on board for any other fighter and civil aircraft.