Controller design for low speed flight in turbulence

Abstract

An autopilot design for low speed flight of a lightly loaded aircraft in the presence of turbulence is investigated. Analysis of wind gust models reveals that gust spectral content is relatively more important than gust magnitude in evaluating aircraft closedloop performance. A representative linear quadratic controller with loop transfer recovery is designed to track airspeed and angle of attack commands. In flight simulation the controller demonstrates good tracking performance with low control power requirements only when a low bandwidth turbulence is modeled in the compensator.