MOSAIC brings confusion to simplified flight controls

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Since the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, pilots of conventional aircraft have used pulleys, cables and linkages — or in the case of fly-by-wire systems decades later, servos and computers — to directly control flight control surfaces and aircraft power. 

Now, language in the Federal Aviation Administration’s recently-unveiled Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification (MOSAIC) final rule has sparked industry confusion and uncertainty surrounding a decades-long pursuit to make general aviation aircraft easier to fly through the use of simplified flight controls (SFCs).

SFCs use automation to control flight surfaces and power instead of direct pilot input. A pilot commands the aircraft to climb, descend, accelerate, decelerate or turn, and automation — not the pilot — decides what to control in order to accomplish that task. 

While SFCs are still an emerging technology, industry has mostly converged on the use of conventional control interfaces as the method for a pilot to make these aircraft commands. Small electric vertical take-off and landing companies like Air and Jump Aero as well as augmented flight control developer Skyryse have all designed systems with inceptors resembling standard control sticks.Companies like these have been operating under the assumption that MOSAIC, by introducing a new framework for the use of SFCs, would open up a market of light sport pilots who could learn to fly aircraft with simpler controls under a lower training burden. Yet the text accompanying the rule that explains the agency’s justification — known as the “preamble” — states that joysticks, yokes and control sticks are “primary flight controls” and therefore do not belong in aircraft with SFCs.

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