Longitudinal control and airwake suppression algorithm for carrier-based aircraft based on model predictive control

Compared with landing on a fixed runway, carrier landing faces with more difficulties and higher risk, such as shorter runway, pitching decks and high relative velocity. What's more, the carrier airwake further deteriorates the situation, which causes aircraft trajectory deviation from reference landing path, and the risk of waving off or colliding with the carrier. Carrier landing safety is therefore seriously affected. Aiming at this problem, on the basis of modelling the small-disturbance motion equation of a carrier-based aircraft under the landing status, the article presented a flight control and airwake rejection algorithm based on state space model predictive control(MPC), in which the airwake models were considered. The computer simulation experiments indicated that the proposed method could effectively suppress the disturbance of carrier airwake, and improve the landing accuracy significantly.