Tracking Performance of Distributed Recoverable Flight Control Systems Subject to High Intensity Radiated Fields

Theoretical tools are presented to analyze the relationship between the design choices for a class of NASA-inspired fault-tolerant, reconfigurable computer architectures and the tracking performance degradation of a digital flight control system implemented on such a platform while operating in a high-intensity radiated field (HIRF) environment. A HIRF experiment was conducted at the NASA Langley Research Center to validate the theory for a distributed Boeing 747 flight control system subject to HIRF upsets.