A study of longitudinal flight maneuvers for the CTOL aircraft model

We study several flight control problems for a conventional aircraft take off and landing (CTOL) flight control model, a simplified model for aircraft longitudinal flight dynamics. In particular, we study the execution of a maneuver for which the aircraft is intended to follow a path in a vertical plane corresponding to specified change in altitude. We formulate the problem as a nonlinear tracking control problem. Controllers are developed for two cases: a non-aggressive maneuver, corresponding to a small altitude change, and an aggressive maneuver, corresponding to a large altitude change. We demonstrate the need to develop a controller that includes feedforward terms in order to achieve aggressive maneuvering. Our approach throughout is to make use of nonlinear control theory, which is complicated by the non-minimum phase characteristics of the CTOL model.