Methods of trim state discovery

Facing with in-flight damage/failure, Adaptive Flight Planer (AFP) should be activated to generate a new flight plan for pilots. To guarantee the solution is feasible, AFP requires knowledge of an aircraft's flight envelope. Therefore, AFP or the pilots should explore and exploit the known or unknown envelope to figure out the feasibility of the preferred final state and the appropriate transitions from initial state to that final state. We propose a novel trim state discovery (TSD) strategy to automatically explore the operating envelope of an aircraft with appreciable but maybe unknown damage or failures. TSD, which is steered under the effect of attractive forces and repulsive forces, will explore a feasible sequence of transitions in flight envelope to get the appropriate set of states. In this paper, several methods of TSD were introduced, and some modified artificial potential field methods were used to traverse the flight envelope space, incorporating envelope constraints as “obstacles” and desirable approach trim states as “attractors”. An F-16 aileron jam scenario is presented to illustrate the utility of TSD for damage-resilient flight planning and guidance.