In the recent years, attention has been gathered in the research field of electric airplanes (EAs), which have electric motors as a power source. EAs have many advantages including low environmental impact and safety. The flight range per charge, however, is shorter than that of conventional airplanes. This paper proposes a range extention control system (RECS) which extends the flight range of EAs by control. It is shown that the power consumption can be minimized by optimizing thrust distribution on multiple propellers with different properties. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulations and experiments.

Aircrafts are desired to be more energy efficient and safer due to the increasing demand for air transportations. However, generally speaking, nowadays commercial airplanes tend to loss stability under wind disturbances, especially during landing. On the other hand, electric airplanes (EAs) are believed to satisfy the two demands because electric motors are used for the propulsion. Especially, as the actuators, electric motors can improve the control performances of EAs compared with internal combustion engines (ICEs). In this paper, by utilizing electric motors' advantages, lift control method using propeller slipstream is proposed for safe landing, which might be a key technology to innovate the design of EAs. Moreover, simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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