Falsification of an aircraft autopilot

The aim of this paper is to apply falsification techniques to the retuning of an aircraft autopilot, using experimental flight data. More precisely, an initial MIMO PI controller, synthesized with a modal technique on a simplified aircraft model, gives a poor performance on the real aircraft. Experimental flight data (generated in the context of our paper with a realistic complete auto-landing simulator) are used to directly retune this controller, without the intermediate step of building with these data a sophisticated nonlinear (possibly time-varying) aircraft model.