Fault Tolerant Flight Control, a Physical Model Approach

Safety is of paramount importance in all transportation systems, but especially in civil aviation. Therefore, in civil aviation, a lot of developments focus on the improvement of safety levels and reducing the risks that critical failures occur. When one analyses recent aircraft accident statistics (Civil Aviation Safety Data 1993-2007 (2008); Smaili et al. (2006)), there are two major categories of accidents which can be attributed to a single primary cause, as illustrated in figure 1. The largest category is "collision with ground" (controlled flight into terrain, CFIT) where a fully functional aircraft hits terrain due to the loss of situational awareness by the pilot, which counts for as much as 26% of the accidents. This percentage is decreasing over the years thanks to the continuously evolving amount and manner of cockpit display information. The second major category is "loss of control in flight", which can be attributed to mistakes made by the pilot or a technical malfunctioning. This category counts for 16% of all aircraft accident cases and is not decreasing.