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CEAS EuroGNC 2026

Flight Test Based System Identification of an Unmanned Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Antonia Franke Student, Technische Universität Dresden, Chair of Flight Mechanics and Control, Dresden, Germany.
Martin Guist Research Assistant, Technische Universität Dresden, Chair of Flight Mechanics and Control, Dresden, Germany.
Sabine Wisbacher Research Assistant, Munich University of Applied Sciences HM, Munich, Germany.
Daniel Ossmann Professor, Munich University of Applied Sciences HM, Munich, Germany.
Harald Pfifer Professor, Technische Universität Dresden, Chair of Flight Mechanics and Control, Dresden, Germany.
Abstract:
This paper presents the setup and results of a flight test campaign performed to identify the longitudinal motion of a small unmanned fixed-wing aircraft. The flight test experiments include manoeuvres to excite short-period and phugoid dynamics, as well as gliding flights to determine drag coefficients. Frequency ranges of the manoeuvre inputs are selected based on the dynamics of an initially derived linear approximation of the aircraft dynamics using aerodynamic vortex lattice method computations. By applying grey-box system identification, the corresponding aerodynamic parameters are estimated from recorded measurement data. The gathered results indicate satisfactory correlation with the mathematical modelling of the aircraft. This not only enables the development of suitable model-based control algorithms but also validates the entire mathematical model development chain for small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles, i.e., from the initial approximation to flight test validation.
Keywords: System Identification; Flight Test; Small fixed-wing UAV
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2026-059 doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-059


Antonia Franke, Martin Guist, Sabine Wisbacher, Daniel Ossmann, Harald Pfifer: Flight Test Based System Identification of an Unmanned Fixed-Wing Aircraft. Proceedings of the 2026 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Madrid, Spain. May 2026. doi: 10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-059.
BibTeX entry (UTF-8):

@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2026-059,
    author = {Franke, Antonia and Guist, Martin and Wisbacher, Sabine and Ossmann, Daniel and Pfifer, Harald},
    title = {Flight Test Based System Identification of an Unmanned Fixed-Wing Aircraft},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
    address = {Madrid, Spain},
    month = may,
    year = {2026},
    doi = {10.82124/CEAS-GNC-2026-059}
}