Optimal abort landing in the presence of severe windshears

Abstract

In this paper, the abort landing problem is considered with reference to a point-mass aircraft model describing flight in a vertical plane. It is assumed that the pilot linearly increases the power setting to maximum upon sensing the presence of a windshear. This option is accounted for in the aircraft model and is not considered as a control. The only control is the angle of attack, which is assumed to lie between minimum and maximum values. The aim of this paper is to construct a feedback strategy that ensures a safe abort landing. An algorithm for solving nonlinear differential games is used for the design of such a strategy. The feedback strategy obtained is discontinuous in time and space so that realizations of control may have a bang-bang structure. To be realistic, outputs of the feedback strategy are being smoothed in time, and this signal is used as control.