An energy descent recovery advisor for large transport aircraft

Abstract

As the journey of an aircraft approaches its final destination, the all'- craft needs to descent in a way that allows it to lower its energy in a timely manner in preparation for final approach and landing. This is routinely achieved through descent planning and executing the appropriate plan. However there are circumstances, such as but not restricted to those associated with air traffic constraints, in which the aircraft will remain high and fast to the extent that it will be unable to then dissipate sufficient energy in time to land. In such occurrences, aircraft tend to approach the destination airfield hot and high, potentially jeopardising the continued safety of the flight. This thesis focuses on the development of techniques and algorithms that detect exceedances in aircraft energy in the descent and provide the crews with assistance in recovering appropriate aircraft energy states when exceedances occur. A monitoring system was developed to trigger a recovery planner on the detection of an exceedance. The planner first generates a vertical profile that allows the aircraft to arrive at a specific waypoint at the right energy and contracted time and this vertical profile is then used by a plan path planner that generates a plan deviation from the flight plan as and when appropriate. The algorithms developed were evaluated using fast-time simulations to assess the capability of the methods in identifying valid recovery strategies and the expected accuracies. The results indicate that real-time crew support is possible and can contribute towards achieving improved safety in flight operations of large transport aircraft.