Development of planes that can match up with speed of light and could move with speed of fire had been the effort of men since the start of aeronautics. In the genre of supersonic planes, the latest one developed by scientist is scramjet that burn air for fuel. This supersonics is fast enough to carry you into the space or around the world within hours.

To control these flying dragons one need to have super control over them and after successful flight of NASA’s X-43 hypersonic jet the efforts to develop controlling mechanism for this plane is on.

Lisa Fiorentini, octoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University and associate professor Andrea Serrani are in process of developing a new control system in collaboration with the U.S AirForce Research Laboratory (ARFL) at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The latest issue of the Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, reported that their controller performed without any error in computer simulations of flight maneuvers. On the project, they are collaborating with Michael A. Bolender, an aerospace engineer, and David B. Doman, a senior aerospace engineer, both of ARFL, as well as Jack McNamara, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

As Fiorentini told controller both guides the jet along its trajectory and keeps it stable during a flight. Sensors keep track of factors like altitude, velocity, and acceleration. As present scramjet is hypersonic, and can fly at Mach 5 or faster. A minor error of a second can take away plane far away. Due to its supersonic speed scramjets are projected as successor to Space Shuttle for trips to International Space Station. To asses the possibility, two flight situations were simulated. In first scramjet had to climb 13, 000 feet in less than six minute and in the second one scramjet from a level start had to climb 25,000 feet in nearly four minutes.

The performance of the previously developed adapter compared with the new one in both simulations. In the first case difference of error between earlier and new one was about 40 to 2 feet. In second case with previously build controller plane crashed in four second, however, new adaptive controller successfully completed task.