Design, development and flight testing of control laws for the Indian Light Combat Aircraft AIAA Paper 2002-4649

The Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) is a single engine, tailless delta wing supersonic fighter aircraft, which is designed to be aerodynamically unstable in the longitudinal axis. In order to stabilize the airframe and achieve the desired performance over the entire flight envelope, the aircraft is equipped with a quad-redundant full-authority fly-by-wire (FBW) flight control system (FCS). The control laws resident in the sophisticated-electronics FBW-FCS, in addition to guaranteeing stability, optimize the aircraft performance and piloted handling qualities over the entire flight envelope for all aircraft external store configurations. This paper gives an overview of the design, development, and testing of the flight control laws for the indigenously developed LCA. The LCA has successfully completed the first block of 12 test flights. These flights were carried out basically to calibrate the air data system and identify the aerodynamic stability and control characteristics. The pilots have rated the aircraft as Level 1 in all the tasks performed during these flights. The paper concludes by presenting typical flight test results.