The emerging fly-by-wire and fly-by-light technologies increase the possibility of producing aircraft with excellent handling qualities and increased performance across the flight envelope. As a result, flight dynamics and control have become an important discipline in the design of air vehicles;​ where it is desired to take into account the dynamic characteristics and automatic control capabilities at the earliest stages of design. Traditionally, very limited considerations have been made at the early conceptual stage regarding this discipline. Some simplified methodologies used to size the control surfaces (i.e. horizontal and vertical tail surfaces) result in sub-optimal designs due to their inability to capture the interactions among the sizing of control surfaces, their control effectors (i.e. elevator and rudder) and it systems, and their effect on the general dynamic behaviour of the aircraft. Such designs have great limitations on control and handling, which lead to costly design modifications at the later stages of design.

This research presents a methodology that enables flight dynamics and control integration at the conceptual design stage using multidisciplinary design optimization. It finds feasible aircraft configurations which meet specified mission requirements concurrently with the stability, control, and handling quality requirements at multiple flight conditions within the flight envelope. Furthermore, the proposed methodology exploits two different control integration strategies. The first one allows for individualized control system design at each flight phase, while the second one focuses on simultaneous stabilization and optimization using one single controller. The application of the methodology leads to designs that exploit active control interactions and have better performance and flying characteristics than the traditional sizing process over a broad range of aircraft sizes.