Safety and environmental considerations in air transportation urge today for the development of new guidance systems with improved accuracy for spatial and temporal trajectory tracking. The main objectives of this thesis dissertation is to contribute to the synthesis of a new generation of nonlinear guidance control laws for transportation aircraft presenting enhanced trajectory tracking performances and to explore the feasibility and performances of a flight guidance system developed within a space-indexed reference with the aim of reducing tracking errors and ensuring the satisfaction of overfly time constraints as well as final arrival time constraint. Before presenting the main approaches for the design of control laws for autopilots and autoguidance systems devoted to transport aircraft and the way current Flight Management Systems generates guidance directives, flight dynamics of transportation aircraft, including explicitly the wind components, are presented. Then, the interest for adaptive flight control is discussed and a self contained adaptive flight path tracking control for various flight conditions taking into account automatically the possible aerodynamic and thrust parametric changes is proposed. Then, the main recognized nonlinear control approaches suitable for trajectory tracking are analyzed. Finally an original vertical space-indexed guidance control law devoted to aircraft trajectory tracking is developed and compared with the classical time-indexed approach.
