• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.49 no.5
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• pp.383-388
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• 2021

Air-breathing engines used in aircraft have a performance limit as the altitude increases, and this determines the service and absolute ceiling altitude. The method of maintaining altitude and speed in a fixed-wing aircraft in level flight using classical control method is generally using thrust for speed increase/deceleration and pitch attitude for altitude increase/decrease. If this method is used near the service ceiling altitude, increasing the pitch to reduce the altitude error results in a speed reduction. Therefore, it is necessary to use a control method that maintains the speed first using the pitch attitude. Especially in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles, these two methods should be automatically available at the right time. In this paper, we propose a method of switching the speed and altitude maintenance algorithm near service ceiling altitude.