The Total Energy Control System (TECS) is a method to control airplane longitudinal flight dynamics by regulating energy and energy balance. This multiple input, multiple output method accounts for the highly coupled nature of aircraft dynamics and allows for control of airspeed and altitude with a proportional-integral controller. This paper reviews the heuristic TECS control law and then validates it in a MATLAB simulation. Next, an adaptive TECS is designed by augmenting the fixed-gain

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... llers in a nominal TECS with retrospective cost optimization-based adaptive controllers. It is shown through simulations that adaptive augmentation improves the closed-loop performance and accelerates the tuning process.