TU Delft Demonstrates New Control Techniques to Prevent Crashes

TU Delft (Delft University of Technology) has developed techniques for maintaining control of aircraft that have been damaged in flight, thereby improving their chances of making a safe landing.  It publically demonstrated the technology in a simulator on November 21.

The demonstration, which reconstructed past troubled flights, such as the El Al flight which crashed in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam in 1992, constituted the final phase of the GARTEUR (group for Aeronautical Research and Technology in Europe) international partnership that has been researching what is called Fault Tolerant Control.  Besides TU Delft, GARTEUR participants for this project included the Netherlands' National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR).

The demonstration showed how the greater calculation capacity of modern computers and progress in the underlying mathematical theory over the past few years, can make it possible to develop ways of helping a pilot control a damaged aircraft under conditions that would otherwise be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

According to TU Delft, both military and civil aviation parties are interested in these developments, but it acknowledges that these techniques are only expected to be introduced into practice in the long term. 11-23-2007.

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