DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CIVIL AND MILITARY ELECTRONIC FLIGHT CONTROL-SYSTEMS

During the last decade, an increasing number of primary and secondary fly-by-wire systems have been developed for civil aircraft. These syst ems have reduced the gap in form and implementation technology which h ad developed between civil and military electronic flight control syst ems. However, there remain significant differences. These differences include systems architecture, redundancy management, external interfac es, software methods and, to a lesser extent, hardware. This paper des cribes some of those differences and why they exist. In particular, th e impact of performance, reliability, availability and safety requirem ents is considered together with the effect of industry traditions and standards.