Listen to an Embraer technical briefing on the Legacy 500/450 fly-by-wire system with Fabrício Caldeira, flight control laws manager (first speaker), and chief project pilot Eduardo Camelier:
▶ Video originally embedded here
player.soundcloud.com
This Flash-based video is no longer available.
For as long as there has been fly-by-wire on aircraft, there’s been a debate about how to best utilize the electronic flight control system and where to draw the line between pilot freedom and hard and fast boundaries protecting the aircraft and its occupants. This debate is far from settled with the most famous dispute between Boeing and Airbus charting different courses through computer driven flight control actuation.
On the one hand, Boeing leaves the pilot’s judgment at the forefront, allowing overspeeding, stalling and over-banking within the flight envelope. The aircraft will let the pilot know, loudly, that they are approaching, or in, a potentially unsafe condition for the aircraft. Additionally, Boeing aircraft include an auto-throttle system resulting in the back-driven motion of the
throttle quadrant providing a tactile cue to pilots without referring to the
EICAS.
For Airbus, fly-by-wire has resulted in hard limits on the aircraft flight envelope, preventing over-speeding, stalling, and over-banking of the aircraft. The maximum bank allowed is 67-deg, with nose-down pitch not exceeding 15-deg and a 2.5g limit. An
auto-thrust system complements the
A-floor protection by automatically spooling up the engines, limiting nose up pitch (angle of attack) to prevent the aircraft from stalling and providing best climb performance.
While these have generally been two polar points on the augmented flight control spectrum, Embraer has charted its own path to full fly-by-wire for its first implementation on its all-new 10-passenger mid-size
Legacy 500 business jet, due for entry into service in late 2012, followed by the smaller
Legacy 450 in 2013. The aircraft were designed around their respective flight control systems allowing Embraer to optimize the structural sizing based upon the built-in protections.
As
it fleshed out the elements of its fly-by-wire philosophy, Embraer drew
on the lessons learned from notable accidents over the years that
involved human factors resulting from improper aircraft handling.
What Embraer has created is its own course for implementing fly-by-wire technology and the Legacy 500 is its first platform. The path that Embraer has laid out for itself will undoubtedly become a hallmark of its flight control philosophy and will find its way the Brazilian airframer’s next generation commercial aircraft.
Photo Credit Embraer
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.