A Full-Authority Automatic Flight Control System for the Civil Airborne Utility Platform S15 – LAPAZ

The market for airborne reconnaissance, surveillance, exploration, and measurement tasks is growing and light civil utility aircraft are suited to fulfil his demand. Missions that are dangerous or extremely long require an automatic flight control system (AFCS) that supports the pilot or that even replace the pilot. Such an AFCS for unmanned aircraft operations has to have full authority, it has to be highly reliable, it must be able to follow precisely predefined trajectories, and it must be able to take off and land automatically. The development and certi-fication of such an AFCS at competitive cost is a major challenge. This paper gives an overview on the LAPAZ project, in which an AFCS is developed for the STEMME S15 utility aircraft. It describes the design objectives, the selected flight control architecture, the system and the development process as well as first flight test results.