There is a renewed interest in dynamic characteristics of damaged aircraft both in order to assess survivability and to develop control laws to enhance survivability. This paper presents a set of flight dynamics equations of motion for a rigid body not necessarily referenced to the body's center of mass. Such equations can be used when the body loses a portion of its mass and it is desired to track the motion of the body's previous center of mass/reference frame now that the mass center has moved to a new position. Furthermore, results for equations presented in this paper and equations in standard aircraft simulations are compared for a scenario involving a generic transport aircraft configuration subject to wing damage.

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Control of complex Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft traversing from hovering to wing born flight mode and back poses notoriously difficult modeling, simulation, control, and flight-testing challenges. This paper provides an overview of the techniques and advances required to develop the GL-10 tilt-wing, tilt-tail, long endurance, VTOL aircraft control system. The GL-10 prototype's unusual and complex configuration requires application of state-of-the-art techniques and some significant advances in wind tunnel infrastructure automation, efficient Design Of Experiments (DOE) tunnel test techniques, modeling, multi-body equations of motion, multi-body actuator models, simulation, control algorithm design, and flight test avionics, testing, and analysis. The following compendium surveys key disciplines required to develop an effective control system for this challenging vehicle in this on-going effort.