The technology of carrier-based aircraft landing is one of the core enablers for the development of modern aircraft carriers and amphibious fleets, directly impacting the safety, reliability, and operational efficiency of carrier-based aircraft. This paper systematically reviews the state-of-the-art technologies and key challenges in the landing of fixed-wing manned and unmanned carrier-based aircraft. First, it provides an overview of the current development status of fixed-wing manned/unmanned carrier-based landing systems and analyzes the differences in performance and mission requirements among various landing systems. Then, in terms of landing guidance technologies, the paper explores the application status of typical single-mode guidance methods and the development trends of multi-modal guidance technologies. In the area of landing control, it analyzes the architecture of typical flight control systems and the research progress of advanced flight control technologies. Furthermore, the study discusses the current research on technologies related to the safety of carrier landing systems. Finally, it summarizes the existing achievements and outlines future development directions, aiming to provide a reference for advancing fixed-wing carrier-based manned/unmanned landing technologies.

The unique advantages of the flying-wing aircraft make it one of the future directions for advanced fighter development. However, in the landing control process, flying-wing aircraft with novel rudder configurations faces such challenges as the nonlinearity, redundancy and coupling of control surfaces, and interference from ship wakes of. To address these issues, this paper establishes a six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear mathematical model of tailless aircraft with multiple control surfaces and proposes a direct force control law based on the Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) control framework. This proposed method designs a direct force trajectory control law, an attitude angle control law, and a speed maintenance control law using the nonlinear incremental dynamic inversion approach. Additionally, a Fixed-Time Disturbance Observer (FTDO) is designed to estimate and compensate for the coupling between the direct force control loop and the attitude control loop, achieving dynamic decoupling between the two loops. Considering various control surface characteristics and the execution capability of thrust vectoring, an integrated direct force control method combining aerodynamic control surfaces and thrust vectoring is designed. The nonlinear control allocation problem is transformed into an incremental linear control allocation problem using the aerodynamic coefficient Jacobian matrix, allowing for rapid online calculation of actual control surface deflection increments. Simulation verification shows that introducing direct force control based on incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion into the landing control law of flying-wing carrier-based aircraft can enhance the ability of such aircraft to quickly correct trajectories and suppress airwake, which ultimately, significantly improves the precision of aircraft landing and provides a solution for the deployment of flying-wing carrier-based aircraft.