Development of Flight Control Panel Interface for Electronic Flight Control System of High Aspect Ratio Light Utility Aircraft

LAPAN Surveillance Aircraft (LSA) - 02 is a high aspect ratio light utility aircraft that is supplemented with Electronic Flight Control System (EFCS) to perform as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology demonstrator. To perform its mission, the test pilot onboard has to input commands via Human Machine Interface (HMI) namely Flight Control Panel (FCP) which is a part of EFCS. The FCP has three main functions which are to load and send initialization data to Flight Control Computer (FCC), to allow the pilot to enter data or give commands manually to FCC, and to display information of sensor, modes, and vice versa to the pilot. However, FCP is merely an input-output device that does not contain algorithms or functions related to aircraft and its flight control system. Therefore, it is required to develop Flight Control Panel Interface (FCPI) to interpret signals from buttons and knobs on FCP, convert and condition those signals to Flight Control Laws (FCLs), and feeds back those signals and other information such as modes and sensors to FCP. The research in this paper shows the development of FCPI which is integrated into the previously developed FCLs model. The development process adopts V model method which starts from the definition of requirements, design of software, and verification by means of EFCS simulation. The results are the refinement of EFCS architecture and FCPI is developed for autopilot functions such as airspeed, heading, altitude, and vertical speed.