Emergency propulsion-based autoland system

Abstract

In this paper, an emergency autoland system capable of landing automatically with the ATTAS research aircraft only using engine thrust variations is presented. This autoland is intentionally kept as simple as possible, but demonstrates good performance even in the presence of uncertainties and external disturbances. The performance in the presence of wind shears is shown in the paper. It is based on a previously published propulsion-based control law for the inner loops. Implementing this simple emergency autoland in modern aircraft is not challenging. Aircraft already in service could also be retrofitted.