A New Longitudinal Flight Path Control with Adaptive Wind Shear Estimation and Compensation

This paper presents a novel approach to the longitudinal guidance and control issue for an aircraft in presence of wind shear. The main contribution concerns the adaptive estimation of the wind shear disturbances affecting the aircraft and the development of a control scheme suitable to compensate these effects during a precision approach procedure. The work proposes the design, based on the Nonlinear Geometric Approach, of three adaptive filters providing the estimate of the wind shear disturbance components. These estimates are exploited, in an original way, by a BackStepping based controller, thus resulting in an Adaptive BackStepping Controller. Simulation results, obtained by means of a detailed flight simulator implementing the real wind shear condition which caused the 1975 crash of Eastern Flight 066 at JFK airport and a Montecarlo robustness test, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.