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Uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) have proven their tremendous capabilities in military and civil applications. In a UAV, the onboard autopilot autonomously controls the aircraft flight and navigation. The altitude acquire-and-hold is an important function of autopilot, implemented using a control design algorithm that flies the UAV to commanded altitude and maintains it. Most of the commercially available autopilots use Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers for altitude and heading control. In this paper, we present a performance comparison of two altitude-controller design techniques, the PID controller and the Phase Lead compensator. We have used a nonlinear mathematical model of the UAV Aerosonde in our work. The nonlinear model is lineraized around a stable trim condition and decoupled for linear controller design. The designed controllers are tested with the nonlinear model in view of small …