Flight control system reconfiguration for “locked and centred” and “non‐neutral position” control surface failures

The research work presented in this paper deals with the design of a reconfigurable flight control system (RFCS) based on the control distribution concept (CDC). The work presented here is concerned with the reconfiguration in response to single and multiple control surface failures. A model of a generic fighter aircraft possessing a relatively large number of control surfaces was selected as a test model for the reconfiguration algorithm. The failure in the form of a control surface stuck at a non‐neutral position is one of the most performances degrading and challenging to recover from by a process of reconfiguration. An algorithm was developed to reconfigure the overall FCS by way of redistributing the control effort to the remaining healthy control surfaces, while at the same time cancelling the effects of control surface deflection locked at a non‐neutral position by the generation of another compensating signal feeding to the FCS.