A MODULAR FLIGHT CONTROL AND NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF ARMY AVIATION

Unprecedented demands will be placed on the flight control and navigation equipment of the next-generation of Army helicopters to enable single crewmember operability in tactical environments. These demands require a degree of automation, and assurance of a level of pilot confidence not yet achieved on conventional, present-generation vehicles. The challenge of providing the requisite levels of navigation and flight control redundancy leads the system designer to consider a tightly integrated flight control and navigation system. Trade studies have been performed concerning the significant issues involved in developing an optimum system architecture. A resulting architecture is presented which would meet anticipated flight control and navigation requirements at an acceptable weight by exploiting techniques of functional and physical integration. The architecture maximizes the sharing of sensor and computational resources in a flight critical environment and employs modular equipment packaging, dual fault-tolerant tetrad Ring-Laser-Gyro inertial measurement units, and triplex self-checking processor pair-based flight critical processing channels.