Flying is solving inverse problems from the pilot's point of view

Abstract

Visual observation from inside the celestial sphere and appreciation of relative velocity between aircraft and obstacles provide the pilot the means for solving the inverse problem of flight controls. Combining the attitude projection method and a local optimization procedure leads to a method for simulating pilot's actions to manually perform intended maneuvers. Two applications are shown. The first one concerns the flight of an airplane through a narrow corridor. The second example deals with an in-flight refuelling when the mutual position of aircraft and hose can be only probabilistically evaluated. Introduction The interpretation of the airplane general motion and control as an inverse problem was firstly carried out about a decade ago'. After the first pioneer works', the subject of aircraft inverse problems received increasing attention, in particular, as far as the design and synthesis of the automatic control and the flight simulators are concerned. In this respect and with reference to the usually complicated redundant problems, excellent achievements were obtained by Hess' approach for speeding up the solutions of inverse problems and its further applications'. All the available references focus the attention on the question of assigning aircraft trajectories and/or flight performances, and then determining the appropriate control actions as functions of the time. In this work attention is paid to the manually governed flight taking into account that, in such a case, the control actions are operated according to the visual evaluation of some state parameters, as observed out of the cockpit window, and to the appreciation of their variations with the time from the pilot's point of view.