Time-Varying Control Strategy for Asymmetric Thrust Flight of Multi-Engines Aircraft

This paper proposes a time-varying pilot control strategy, which is suitable for asymmetric thrust flight of multi-engine aircraft caused by single engine failure. To address the critical issue of lateral imbalance caused by thrust asymmetry, pilot control models for inner-loop attitude-heading control under aileron input and command sideslip control under rudder input are developed. Taking the time-varying adaptive characteristics of the pilot and the changes in flight states induced by thrust asymmetry into account, an adaptive inner-loop attitude-heading control logic and a command sideslip control strategy are proposed. Subsequently, a time-varying pilot lateral control strategy model is established. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed time-varying control strategy ensures stable and controllable heading and flight attitude effectively. When compared with human-in-the-loop flight experiments, the time-domain results reveal that the flight states exhibit similar trends. A time-varying aircraft-pilot couplings evaluation indicates a reduced susceptibility to pilot-induced oscillations, with both systems showing consistent behavior, verifying the reliability of the proposed time-varying control strategy. The proposed pilot model can assist and guide the pilot in completing control tasks during single-engine failure.