What do pilot inputs actually mean to fly by wire aircraft?

Question

Is stick input considered “desired turn rate” “desired angle of attack” or something else?

In: 8

Answer 1

There are no physical connections from the flight stick/yoke to the control surfaces on the aircraft.

Old school aircraft had actual wires that would push/pull the flight surfaces… This evolved into hydraulics…

Fly-by-wire replaces those physical connections with electronic ones .. so the input provided by the pilot goes through a computer and is output to the electrically controlled control surface…

The F-16 and F-117 were some of the best examples… Both were aerodynamically unstable and needed a flight computer to translate the pilots’ input to reliability control the plane(s)…