RuAviation

In difficult weather conditions, low cloud cover, gusty winds and heavy snow, which developed in the Moscow region on 14 December 2023, the MS-21 prototype aircraft with registration number 73053 performed an ICAO Category III automatic landing. Zhukovsky Flight Control congratulated the crew on another step towards certification of the import-substituted version of the airliner. The aircraft was piloted by a crew consisting of Andrey Voropayev, 1st class test pilot of the Yakovlev Design Bureau, Oleg Mutovin, test pilot of the Yakovlev Design Bureau, Hero of Russia, and flight operators Alexander Solovyov and Oleg Berezin.

Instrumental approach and landing certification is required to confirm an aircraft’s ability to perform all-weather flights. In this case, in each particular case, the meteorological minimum for landing is determined based on the minimums of the aerodrome, aircraft and its commander at the highest of them. The highest is considered to be category IIIC, when landing is allowed under any visibility conditions without restrictions up to its complete absence horizontally and vertically. An aircraft equipped in accordance with category IIIC must provide automatic descent, levelling, landing and runway run, using the autopilot and instruments installed at the aerodrome.

The peculiarity of this event is that the algorithms of the integrated control system (ICS) and automatic control system (ACS) provide automatic landing regardless of what kind of avionics is installed on the aircraft, in this case the equipment is imported. The algorithms were developed jointly by the Automatic Control Systems Department of Yakovlev PJSC and the Moscow Institute of Electromechanics and Automation (MIEA). The hardware part was developed by KRET and MIEA.

PJSC MIEA creates advanced avionics for aircraft, develops inertial navigation systems to equip Russian-made passenger and transport aircraft, navigation computer systems, automatic control and aircraft guidance systems, the press service of KRET explained to the Russian Aviation website. The control system units are manufactured at the Ural Instrument-Making Plant in Yekaterinburg.

This flight was the fourth in the programme of factory tests of the automatic landing system. Certification tests will follow in the future. In total, about 100 flights are to be performed.

“The software algorithms and the complex control system providing automatic landing were initially developed in Russia. In 2024, they will continue to be tested on the MS-21 with Russian systems and units to obtain category IIIA for the aircraft in import-substituted form,” UAC added.