Control Law Mapping Etc
It seems to me that the confusion (here anyway) about the various control
laws could be made a lot easier to dispell if there was a chart showing
the rules and input conditions under which each are transitioned
to and from. A nice big A3 sheet perhaps, as a picture is always worth
more than dry text.
To put it another way, to transition from one law to another depends on
a variety of input data, logical, boolean and variable. A boolean
variable might be something like the ap or ath dropping out (ie: on or
off), while a variable might be airspeed, aoa or similar. A logical
function being and / or / sum of 2 or more inputs to generate an output.
Apologies if this seems a bit abstract, but the transition between the
various laws does seem to be key to understanding what happened to
af447.
From what's been discussed here, it seems to me that the control law
logic is not smart enough by half. As someone else said, it looks rule
based, when what's really needed is a more fuzzy, or semi ai approach
that takes into account history and trends, as well as all the
variables to arrive at a conclusion. It then presents this to the pilot
as a best effort scenario of where it's going before handing control back.
More of a big picture view, rather than the fine granularity of individual
system failure alarms. Even with partial system failure, there should
still be enough data and history to get an idea of where it's all going.
Would guess that there is some of this already, but it does seem to give up
just at the point where it most needs to be providing a bit more intelligent
reasoning. Before anyone gets excited about the idea of yet more automation,
such a system would provide only information, not direct control of the
aircraft...