This paper addresses the exploitation of the combined potential of the directly-actuated and the underactuated control authorities of unmanned aerial vehicles with thrust-vectoring actuation. For the modeling, control synthesis and experimental evaluation a custom developed unmanned tri-tiltrotor is employed, equipped with rotor-tilting mechanisms which enable the direct actuation of its longitudinal dynamics, while retaining the standard body-pitching underactuated authority. An explicit model predictive control scheme relying on constrained multiparametric optimization is proposed for the dual-authority optimal control. The backbone of this scheme is a modeling representation that incorporates the separate internal dynamics of the two actuation principles and their interferences as they concurrently act on the free-flying vehicle C. Papachristos ( ) · A. Tzes