ABSTRACT
The history of aviation provides a nice example of innovation that stems from formulating a problem within a control framework and of the central role played by the human in completing the design of many systems. The complexity of the adaptation problem is illustrated by S. Sastry and M. Bodson’s description of an adaptive control system designed for the CH-47 helicopter: The flight envelope of the helicopter was divided into ninety flight conditions corresponding to thirty discretized horizontal flight velocities and three vertical velocities. It is important for designers to recognize when human performers may use different styles of adaptation requiring different types of support. The classical cybernetic view of human performance is the servomechanism. The control language may also help to cut through some of the rhetoric that can hinder communication among researchers. For example, there is the curious notion of “direct” perception.
