Abstract: A hierarchical intelligent control method is developed and applied to the‘iron bird' system,a complex and large aeronautical engineering system.The feature and interrelated control problems of the system are introduced in this paper.The design procedures of the intelligent control system and the expertsupervisory system,including hierarchical coordinated control structure and several main intelligent controllers and expert compensators,and fault detection and diagnosis using real-time expert system techniques,are presented.The hierarchical intelligent control is implemented by real-time distributed controlcomputers.The proposed hierarchical intelligent control system has been successfully applied to an actual‘iron bird',and good results have been obtained.