Control Allocation as it pertains to aerospace vehicles, describes the way in which control surfaces on the outside of an aircraft are deflected when the pilot moves the control stick inside the cockpit. Previously, control allocation was performed by a series of cables and push rods, which connected the 3 classical control surfaces (ailerons, elevators, and rudder), to the 3 cockpit controls (longitudinal stick, lateral stick, and rudder pedals). In modern tactical aircraft however, it is not uncommon to find as many as 10 or more control surfaces which, instead of being moved by mechanical linkages, are connected together by complex electrical and/or hydraulic circuits. Because of the large number of effectors, there can no longer be a one-to-one correspondence between surface deflections on the outside of the cockpit to pilot controls on the inside. In addition, these exterior control surfaces have limits which restrict the distance that they can move as well as the speed at at which they can move. The purpose of Constrained Control Allocation is to deflect the numerous control surfaces in response to pilot commands in the most efficient combinations, while keeping in mind that they can only move so far and so fast. The implementation issues of Constrained Control Allocation techniques are discussed, and an aerodynamic model of a highly modified F-15 aircraft is used to demonstrate the various aspects of Constrained Control Allocation. This work was conducted under NASA research grant NAG-1-1449 supervised by John Foster of the NASA Langley Research Center / Master of Science

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, military aviation technology grew expensive and politically divisive, and this is not without precedent. In the 1960s and 1970s, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon represented a controversial shift both in the cost of development and in tactical doctrine for the United States Air Force (USAF), yet the motivating factors that influenced their design are not fully understood. Most of the literature either has focused on a teleological exploration of technical evolution or has held to a “genius inventor” paradigm, lionizing individual engineers and planners. Other works have focused on these aircraft as factors that changed the Air Force's tactical approach to warfighting or have simply evaluated their combat performance. Although these approaches are valuable, they do not account for the effect that institutional culture and historical memory had on the F-15 and F-16 programs. This dissertation argues that the culture of the fighter pilot community was based on a constructed memory of World War I fighter combat, idealizing a heroic, romanticized image of “Knights of the Air.” This fighter pilot community attempted to influence the F-15 and F-16 programs to conform to their vision of an idealized past. Furthermore, a smaller group of these pilots, calling themselves the “Fighter Mafia” (and later the “Reformers”) radicalized these ideas, rejecting the Eagle and Falcon as not representative of their ideal vision. Through public and political activism, this group affected the discourse of military technology from the mid-1970s to the present. Drawing on David Nye’s work on the connections between technology and cultural historical narratives and identity, this work will demonstrate that culture and institutional historical memory can be important factors in driving the development of military technology.