For large civil aircraft, aviation accidents mainly occur in the landing phase. To enhance flight safety, this paper presents an automatic landing controller that integrates \(\mathcal {L}_1\) adaptive control with dynamic inversion for civil aircraft. Firstly, a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) nonlinear dynamics model of a civil aircraft is constructed, and a standard landing trajectory is defined. Secondly, a cascaded attitude control structure is established, where Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) is employed for the attitude loop and Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is adopted for the angular rate loop to reduce model dependency. Thirdly, an \(\mathcal {L}_1\) adaptive controller based on the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) error dynamics is integrated to actively compensate for model uncertainties and external disturbances. In addition, the outer guidance loop is designed to implement the whole automatic landing system. Finally, three simulation scenarios including nominal flight, atmospheric gusts, and model uncertainties are performed to validate the effectiveness and superior tracking performance of the proposed \(\mathcal {L}_1\) -NDI controller.
