A NONLINEAR CONTROL APPROACH FOR RELATIVE GUIDANCE OF COMMERCI AL AIRCRAFT 7 JULY 2003

The delegation to the flight crew of tasks currently performed by the air traffic controllers provides a new perspective to significantly increase air traffic control capacity. Then, merging and station keeping operations have appeared to be of interest even if they rise new technical challenges. Indeed, these unusual maneuvers in the field of Civil Aviation seem difficult to be performed manually and since in this case they will result in an increase of the flight crew workload, new on-board automated functions should be developed. This paper investigates the design of an auto pilot mode dedicated to merging and station keeping maneuvers behind a leading aircraft. The proposed relative flight guidance law is based on a non linear sliding mode control technique. Simulation results are displayed and discussed