Many endeavors have been made to prevent aircraft loss of control after sudden structural and aerodynamic failures, and one of which is safe flight envelope prediction. Considering the unpredictable nature of such failures, many challenges and restrictions exist in the process of implementing such a prediction system. In this paper an approach to online safe flight envelope prediction is proposed, which is done by retrieving information from offline assembled databases. One of the key steps of this approach is determining the structural damage state of the aircraft by using the identification, detection and classification methods presented in this paper. The estimated damage cases will lead to structural damage indices in the database corresponding to those safe flight envelopes that are 'closest' to the actual safe flight envelope of the damaged aircraft. The feasibility of the proposed database-driven approach is proved by simulation results, where three damage cases on a Cessna Citation are successfully detected and classified.
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