The initial flight-test operations of piloted aircraft, in which Digital Flight Control (DFC) systems were first employed, exposed handling qualities problems that were not predicted during the design stage. Subsequent studies attributed the cause of these problems to the techniques used in the design of the digital control systems. The particular feature which unites the reported difficulties is that, an infinite-resolution sampled-data model is assumed for the design process but the practical DFC implementation is realised as an amplitude-quantised sampled-data system.