Event-based diagnosis of flight maneuvers of a fixed-wing aircraft

Abstract

Despite all efforts to improve the reliability of aircraft, the possibility of failure occurrences cannot be completely eliminated, and hence, airplane safety forever remains as a post-developmental concern. In times of peril, flight crews have a minimal amount of time to detect and determine an occurred fault. An automated fault diagnosis tool can help timely detect occurred faults and increase the flight crew’s odds of recovering the plane before a possible crash. As a solution, this paper proposes a diagnosis tool that provides diagnostic information based upon the pilot’s corrective inputs to level an aircraft’s wings. For this purpose, this paper models a fixed-wing aircraft as a discrete event system (DES). The constructed model is then used to develop a diagnosis tool, a so-called diagnoser, for detecting, isolating, and identifying fault occurrences in the ailerons (left and right) of the aircraft. The developed diagnoser can be asynchronously activated during the aircraft’s operation and provides diagnostic information in real time.