The purpose of using life extending control for Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter is to make a trade-off between the handling qualities and the service life of critical components. An increase in service life span results in enhanced safety and the reduction in maintenance costs. This paper presents a design methodology of life extending control for structural durability and high performance of mechanical system, which is based on an explicit dynamic inversion control scheme. A real-time nonlinear fatigue crack growth model is built to predict fatigue damage resulting from the impact of cyclic bending stress on rotor shaft, which serves as an indicator of service life. The 4-axis gainscheduled flight controller, whose gains are adjusted as a function of damage and flight velocity, is designed to regulate roll attitude, pitch attitude, vertical velocity and yaw rate. The nonlinear system simulation results show that the responses can meet the requirements on ADS-33 Level 1 handling qualities and that the 4-axis decoupling control is realized. As the damage increases, the tracking performance is slightly degraded, which results in smaller transients in bending moment response.
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