A utility aircraft for remote sensing missions with a high-precision automatic flight control system

Light civil utility aircraft are well suited for remote sensing missions and to serve as an airborne platform for efficient reconnaissance, surveillance, exploration, and measurement tasks in a growing market. Missions where the pilot has to operate a payload require an automatic flight control system (AFCS) to support the pilot. In missions that are extremely difficult, long or dangerous, the AFCS may even replace the pilot. Such an AFCS has to follow precisely predefined trajectories and should compensate disturbances due to atmospheric turbulence. For un-manned aircraft operations it has to have full authority, it has to be highly reliable, and it must be able to take off and land automatically. The development and certification of such an AFCS at competitive cost is a major challenge. This paper gives an overview on the STEMME S15 utility aircraft, for which an AFCS has been developed. It describes the design objectives, the selected flight control architecture, the system, and the flight test equipment as well as flight test results that demonstrate the high precision of flight path control.