"Smart Plane" Technology Could Help Damaged Craft Fly Right

John Roach
for National Geographic News

May 23, 2007

Airplane technology under development at NASA could bring a whole new meaning to the term "autopilot."

Called the Intelligent Flight Control System, the futuristic software is meant to help keep damaged planes flying right even in the face of catastrophic failure.

Fighter pilots could return to safety with a shot-up wing, for example, or a commercial jetliner could land with a busted stabilizer.

The software knows how the airplane should fly, said James Smolka, a test pilot at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, who has been working on the project.

If the plane starts to fly differently than it should, the system will adjust controls such as rudders, flaps, and engines to get it back on track.

"It measures the actual [flight patterns] and it knows what it prefers to have, and it tries to change the actual to fly more like the desired," Smolka said.

(Related news: "Self-Healing Spacecraft? Tiny Tubes Ooze Epoxy" [January 27, 2006].)

With this technology, even pilots who lack special training on how to make those adjustments themselves could stay in control of the plane, he added.

Crash Prevention

One example of where such technology could have been useful is Alaska Airlines Flight 261, which lost control of its horizontal stabilizer and spun into the Pacific Ocean off California on January 21, 2000.

(Related images: disasters reconstructed.)

"That airplane very likely could have been flown by a system like this without much difficulty," Smolka said.

The technology could also prevent pilots from intentionally disabling a plane—the suspected cause of the EgyptAir Flight 990 crash.

That incident occurred in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket, Massachusetts, on October 31, 1999.

"Does it make sense for the pilot to shut both engines down on a two-engine plane?" asked Smolka, referring to the EgyptAir crash.

The Intelligent Flight Control System, he said, could prevent a pilot from making such an error, intentional or otherwise.

Pushing the System

So far, Smolka has test-flown a modified F-15 aircraft with an early version of the control system.

When errors are intentionally introduced, a few irregular motions are noticeable, he said, "but the airplane settles out pretty quickly."

However, the project has yet to really push the system with catastrophic failures that would normally result in a plane crash.

"You can do that in a simulator pretty easily, but in the actual airplane it's a little more difficult to do," he said.

"But at some point you do need to validate that the results you're getting in the simulator are the results you're going to get on an actual airplane," he added.

For now, however, the program lacks funding and prioritization to design, develop, and outfit planes with the technology.

Ultimately, dspite the occasional tragedy, Smolka said, commercial planes today are very reliable.

James Burin, director of technical programs for the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia, said the technology would be most applicable to military aircraft, which have a greater risk of losing control.

"It is very rare for a commercial aircraft to have a malfunction of this type," he commented via email.

"The minimal decrease in risk this technology would provide to commercial aircraft is probably not worth the cost."

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