This paper addresses the design of flight control for a micro air vehicle type quad‐rotor, which assumes partial measurements of outputs and uncertainties/perturbations affecting the aircraft performance. Under such conditions, the approach is a continuous and smooth differentiator based on an adaptive sliding mode controller. The differentiator output is a sufficiently smooth and accurate estimation of the full state even in the presence of noise, such that it allows calculation of the control law. The adaptive sliding control ensures that the quad‐rotor tracks desired trajectories subject to external disturbances, where its adaptive gains use a minimal gain large enough to remain on the sliding mode, but increases their value to reject perturbations as soon as they appear. Furthermore, a closed loop analysis of the controller observer scheme and numerical simulations shows the feasibility and advantages of the proposed method.