The ARISTOTEL project was challenged with ensuring aircraft safety and aimed to reduce the aircraft and rotorcraft accidents caused by a particularly unfavourable category of phenomena: aircraft-pilot-couplings and rotorcraft-pilot-couplings (A/RPCs).

Generally, A/RPCs are defined as inadvertent, sustained aircraft oscillations which are a consequence of an abnormal joint enterprise between the aircraft and the pilot. Experiences at the start of this project showed that modern designs were being increasingly confronted with dangerous A/RPCs. The reason for this was that modern aircraft feature a significant level of automation in their flight-control-systems (FCS). The FCS are generally intended to relieve pilot workloads and allow operations in degraded weather and visibility conditions. Especially in the modern rotorcraft, there seemed to be embedded tendencies predisposing the FCS system towards dangerous RPCs. As the level of automation was likely to increase in future designs, extending to smaller aircraft and to different kinds of operations, the consequences of the pilot fighting the FCS system and inducing A/RPCs needed to be eradicated.