An automatic control solution for impaired airplane with asymmetrical engine failures

An asymmetrical engine failure in a multi-engine aircraft during flight can pose an immediate threat and lead to a fatal crash if no appropriate corrective action is taken in time. Although almost all pilots are trained to follow a protocol to manually mitigate the crisis, asymmetrical engine failure still remains as one of the main precursors leading to fatal aircraft crash. In this paper, an automatic control solution designed based on H2 servomechanism control theory is proposed to effectively address this issue. The NASA GTM (Generic Transport Model) T2 aircraft, which is a twin-turbine unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is employed as a test bed. The UAV is 5 5% dynamically scaled to realistically simulate characteristics of a full-scale large civil transport jet aircraft.