Data-Driven Model for Detection, Isolation and Accommodation of Faulty Angle of Attack Sensor Measurements in Fixed Winged Aircraft

Ethiopian Airlines’ Boeing 737-8 MAX nosedived and crashed shortly after takeoff on March 10, 2019, at Ejere Town, south of Addis Ababa. A faulty angle of attack (AOA) sensor was the cause of the crash. Many airplane accidents have been linked to faulty AOA sensors in the past. The majority of the AOA sensor fault detection, isolation, and accommodation (SFDIA) literature relied on linear model-driven techniques, which are not suitable when the system’s model is uncertain, complex, or nonlinear. Traditional multilayer perceptron (MLP) models have been employed in data-driven models in the literature and the effectiveness of deep learning-based data-driven models has not been investigated. In this work, a data collection and processing method that ensures the collected data is not monotonous and a data-driven model for AOA SFDIA is proposed. The proposed model uses a deep learning-based recurrent neural network (RNN) to accommodate for faulty AOA measurement under flight conditions with faulty AOA measurement, faulty total velocity measurement, and faulty pitch rate measurement. Conventional residual analysis with a fixed threshold is used to detect and isolate faulty AOA sensors. The proposed and benchmark models are trained with the adaptive momentum estimation (Adam) algorithm. We show that the proposed model effectively detects, isolates, and accommodates faulty AOA measurements when compared to other data-driven benchmark models. The method is able to detect and isolate faulty AOA sensors with a detection delay of 0.5 seconds for ramp failure and 0.1 seconds for step failure.