The flight control systems, designed in order to assure the necessary safety level even in failure conditions, are generally
characterized by a proper redundant layout. The redundancies must be designed in order to assure an adequate system behavior when
some failures are present; in fact an incorrect layout may cause serious shortcomings concerning the response when some component is
not operational. Therefore the usual correct design activities request the complete analysis of the system behavior in failure condition.
The work analyses the response of a redundant secondary flight control hydraulic servo-mechanism equipped with some proper
equalization devices, when some of the most probable and representative failures are present. It must be noted that the redundancy
layout, designed in order to assure the necessary safety level even in failure conditions, may behave improperly during normal
operations, if the system architecture is unsuitable, when manufacturing defects are present. The improper behavior, generally
consisting of force fighting or speed fighting caused by different offsets or asymmetries between the two sections of the system, may be
usually overcome by means of a suitable equalization device. Therefore, the system behavior during and following the failure transient
greatly depends on both its redundancy architecture and related equalization device. The above mentioned problems have been studied
by means of an appropriate physical-mathematical model of a typical electro-hydraulic servo-mechanism prepared to the purpose,
performing a certain number of simulations of representative actuations in which different types of failures are accurately modeled. In
the opinion of the authors, this paper concerns a topic quite neglected but important in the technical literature. At the best of the authors’
knowledge, no specific scientific work in this field is available, excepting some industrial technical reports