Aircraft Damage Identification and Classification for Database-driven Online Safe Flight Envelope Prediction

Safe flight-envelope prediction is essential for preventing aircraft loss of control after the occurrence of sudden structural damage and aerodynamic failures. Considering the unpredictable nature of such failures, many challenges remain in the process of implementing such a prediction system. In this paper, an approach to online safe flight-envelope prediction is proposed that is based on the retrieval of information from offline-assembled databases. One of the key steps of this approach is determining the structural damage of the state of the aircraft by using the identification, detection, and classification methods presented in this paper. The estimated damage cases will lead to structural damage indices in the database corresponding to those safe flight envelopes that are “closest” to the actual safe flight envelope of the damaged aircraft. The feasibility of the proposed database-driven approach is proved by simulation results, where three damage cases are successfully detected and classified.