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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 92 - Dayton - October 2003
Agenda Location	9 SUBCOMMITTEE A – AERONAUTIC AND SURFACE VEHICLES 9.1 A Historical Perspective on the Development of Fly-by-Wire Technology
Title	A Historical Perspective on the Development of Fly-by-Wire Technology
Presenter	H. Max Davis
Available Downloads*	presentation
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Abstract	Fly-by-Wire (FBW) control technology developed out of a stream of rapid advancements in flight control during the late 1950s through early 70s. The objectives of the overall program were to improve flight path control precision and robustness throughout the flight envelope of high performance aircraft. Missions and flight envelopes were expanding and creating a wide range of rapidly changing flight conditions. Control systems had to adapt to meet these changes. Even in the late 1940s, it was apparent to some that electrical and electronic components offered the preferred approach to adaptive system mechanization, if the resulting system could be made reliable. By the mid 1960s mechanical controls became a performance limiting constraint for new command control designs and attention focused on the development of a new, all Fly-by-Wire control system architecture. NASA foresaw the need for an integrated digital mission and flight control system architecture. Fly-by-Wire architecture forced a rethinking of control system reliability design requirements and resulted in a high performance, redundant analog or digital system that that could be readily tailored to many specific flight and mission requirements, and could be integrated with the rest of the mission avionics suite. It turned out that FBW system's fault detection capabilities offered synergistic maintenance improvements. In retrospect the development of FBW technology could appear as a logical exercise in technology improvement. It was not. Getting funding involved a carefully planned internal marketing scheme based on an opportunistic application to meet a current operational requirement deficiency, combat survivability. "Over-my-dead-body" objections had to be overcome or circumvented. Once the system was flown with favorable pilot endorsements, resistance melted. Since the first flight demonstrations in 1972 most new high performance military and commercial aircraft have incorporated Fly-by-Wire control system concepts in the overall design.