The innate intelligence of fly-by-wire (FBW) flight controls makes them a natural for reducing the relatively high pilot workload that can come with rotary wings. But to understand what sort of response the pilot expects from control inputs, a standard FBW system needs to be told what phase of flight or environment the helicopter is flying in, reimposing some workload that two research engineers with the Ottawa-based National Research Council Canada Institute for Aerospace Research (aka NRC Aerospace) aim to eliminate.
Bill Gubbels and Kris Ellis have been developing this technology for the past four years, and they are excited about its possibilities. Said Stewart Baillie, director of the NRC Aerospace Flight Research Laboratory, “This new control system architecture gives pilots stability when they need it and agility when [with their primary flight-control inputs] they request it, all without making deliberate ‘mode-choice’ decisions on what the situation demands.” After flying the system in NRC’s technology demonstrator Bell 412, Baillie declared, “I would not want to fly any other way.”
