AIRCRAFT FLIGHT DATA COMPATIBILITY CHECKING USING MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD AND EXTENDED KALMAN FILTER ESTIMATION.

Abstract

The potential benefits of compatibility checking of aircraft dynamic flight data has, in the past, not been fully realized when applied to real data. It is suggested that this is partly due to the presence of errors in the real data which are not usually accounted for in computer simulation studies. When factors such as instrument offset from centre of gravity, measurement time delays, sinusoidal disturbances and non-linearities are accounted for, good results can be achieved with moderate quality instrumentation. The effect of these factors on the identified instrument errors are studied using the extended Kalman Filter approach and the maximum likelihood method. The relative merits of each..