Stability analysis of aircraft’s sudden damage process with ROA overlapping

Purpose: The paper aims to propose a stability analysis method based on region-of-attraction (ROA) overlapping to evaluate the flight stability of the possible sudden damage process and guarantee flight safety in extreme cases. Design/methodology/approach: First, according to the two flight conditions before and after damage which the aircraft may encounter, flight dynamical models are built and fitted by polynomial equation for subsequent ROA analysis. And then, the ROA overlapping estimation method based on V-s iteration is presented to complete the stability analysis of such airplane sudden damage process. Findings: Finally, in the presence of control surface damage, case aircraft flight stability is analyzed and simulated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Practical implications: The proposed method can be used for stability check during the aircraft control law design, or for further completing the design of the emergency stable controller design. Originality/value: Compared with previous studies on sudden damage process of aircraft, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the pioneer studies in which the ROA and ROA overlapping concept has been introduced. This study on stability analysis of aircraft sudden damage process could further develop the theory of emergency stable control.