Who is really flying in the cockpit?
At any given time, there are more than 5,000 airplanes in United States Airspace transporting passengers to one of over 19,000 airports around the country. Tens of thousands of hours are spent in the sky on any given day and accompanied on every flight is the plane’s autopilot system (Awad, Wang).
When air travel was first introduced, flying demanded complete control by the pilot. As air travel became more advanced, longer flight routes became possible making pilots more likely to experience fatigue. Autopilot systems were created to automate some of the tasks and make flying easier (Efimov, Raissi).
Planes are controlled three dimensionally by adjusting the pitch, yaw, and roll. A change in pitch would point the nose of the plane up or down, yaw left or right, and roll would rotate the length of the plane left or right. These adjustments are made by moving the elevators, the rudder, and ailerons respectively. A basic autopilot system works by mechanizing control of pitch, yaw, or roll by the given parameters of the pilot (Damiano, Fatiha).
In the case of commercial aircraft, the autothrottle and autopilot is maneuvered by a highly equipped navigation computer, known as a “Flight Management System” that is installed onboard. The programming of the Flight Management System is done by the pilot himself before flight to control the altitude, cruising speed, and landmarks being entered. The Flight Management System employs radio signals and instrument readings from fixed points on the ground to find out what adjustments need to be made in order to meet the flight plan (Damiano, Fatiha).
Since these advanced autopilot systems are beneficial to the pilot and accurate in maximizing efficiency, they are almost always employed throughout a commercial flight. However, human pilots are still necessary and take control of the aircraft during takeoff and landings and sometimes during mid flight (Zohlgadri).
Automated systems can be very helpful when weather conditions are not ideal or when emergencies are happening. Rather than relying on visual cues that pilots need in order to fly safely, these systems use radar to technology to fly and even land planes. Without these systems, cloudy weather and fog makes commercial aircraft almost impossible to land by pilots themselves (Surnan, Widborne).
Figure 1: Flowchart showing how the autopilot reads and processes information.
Figure 2: Diagram of the mechanical functions of the airplane
References:
Shaoming He, Jiang Wang, Defu Lin. (2016) Robust Missile Autopilots With
Finite-TimeConvergence. Asian Journal of Control 18:3, 1010-1019
- Awad, H. P. Wang. (2016) Integrated Pitch-Yaw Acceleration Autopilot Design for
Varying-Velocity Man Portable Missile. International Journal of Modeling and Optimization 6:1, 11-17 Online publication date: 1-Jan-2016.
- Efimov, T. Raissi, W. Perruquetti, A. Zolghadri. (2015) Design of interval observers
for estimation and stabilization of discrete-time LPV systems. IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information Online publication date: 7-Jun-2015.
Damiano Rotondo, Fatiha Nejjari, Vicenç Puig, Joaquim Blesa. (2015) Model reference
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Online publication date: 25-Mar-2015.
Sunan Chumalee, James F. Whidborne. (2015) Gain-Scheduled H ∞ Control for Tensor
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