Fault tolerant control aims at removing or at least reducing the negative effects of disturbances in an automation system, in order to maintain the best performance as far as possible. Such a task is performed in three steps: the fault detection, the fault identification, and the consequent process recovery. Let us consider a hybrid model in which a continuous, time invariant, linear system is excited by a quantised disturbance signal: a decoding approach can be undertaken to perform detection and identification. For this purpose, in this article we propose a low-complexity, recursive decoding algorithm, which has been developed using techniques from information and coding theory and here adapted to the control framework. Our aim is to analyse and test the decoding approach to control in the case of binary quantisation, in a flight control scenario. We report both theoretical and simulations' results and derive optimal design criteria.