Toward intelligent flight control

Flight control systems can benefit by being designed to emulate functions of natural intelligence. Intelligent control functions fall in three categories. Declarative actions involve decision making, providing models for system monitoring, goal planning, and system/scenario identification. Procedural actions concern skilled behavior and have parallels in guidance, navigation, and adaptation. Reflexive actions are more or less spontaneous and are similar to inner-loop control and estimation. Intelligent flight control systems will contain a hierarchy of expert systems, procedural algorithms, and computational neural networks, each expanding on prior functions to improve mission capability, to increase the reliability and safety of flight, and to ease pilot workload.