Aircraft Dynamics & Control

Dear Colleagues,

Applications of atmospheric flight dynamics and control encompass most fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft. With advances in computation, advanced materials, sensing, and actuation, novel flight concepts such as morphing aircraft, control configured vehicles, distributed and collocated sensor-actuator enabled aircraft are getting a lot more traction and mainstream acceptance. Flight dynamics and control essentially combines principles from aerodynamics, mechanics and control theory. In this context, even structural dynamics is a discipline very often tightly integrated with the aforementioned topics, especially in relation to aeroelasticity and aeroservoelasticity.

As such, flight dynamics and control are still studied and taught, in the classical sense, where the aerodynamic forces and moments are expressed as functions of vehicle states to facilitate analysis. While these traditional methods are suitable for conventional aircraft motion, the nonlinear interactions in proximity operation of two aircraft (such as aerial refueling), carrier deck landing (influence of carrier wake on the approaching aircraft) in high sea states call for a different approach and need non-classical treatment of the dynamics and control problems. Better modeling of aerodynamic coupling and the nonlinear effects will enhance our understanding of the flight dynamics, which, in turn, enables the engineer and the practitioner to devise suitable control laws.

This collection invites papers that address the areas of flight dynamics and control of atmospheric flight vehicles (mostly fixed-wing and rotorcraft). Of interest are papers that address nonlinear regimes of flight, analysis and recovery from departure modes, dynamics of non-traditional aircraft, rotorcraft, guidance, navigation, and control, use of computational tools for real-time flight control synthesis, performance optimization, control allocation and reconfiguration, inflight stall margin predictions, certifiable non-linear control algorithms.

Assoc. Prof. Kamesh Subbarao
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• autonomous systems
• aerodynamic technologies
• guidance navigation and control
• fixed-wing aircraft
• rotorcraft
• reconfigurable/fault tolerant control
• flight dynamics
• carrier deck landing
• real-time performance optimization
• certifiable non-linear control
• control allocation
• stall margin prediction
• recovery from departure modes
• aeroelasticity and aeroservoelasticity
• morphing aircraft
• aircraft proximity operations (refueling, formation flight)