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Problem. The features of the design and operation of piston engines in general aviation are considered. Comparative analysis of design features and parameters of automobile and aircraft engines is carried out. It is shown that car engines, despite the high technical level achieved at the beginning of the 21st century, do not technically meet aviation requirements. At the same time, engines created on the basis of automobiles through their deep modernization meet aviation requirements, however, modernization and adaptation of a standard automobile engine to aviation use in terms of costs compared to the creation of a new engine. Purpose. Carry out research on the failure of automobile engines used in light aviation. Methodology. Rough calculations of the service life of an automobile engine were made based on standard driving tests and a flight plan. According to the results of calculations, it has been established that the resource of a standard automobile engine in aviation is reduced many times due to prolonged operation at high loads and rotational speed that are not characteristic of ordinary automotive applications. Results. Experimental data have been obtained on the actual failure of standard automobile engines in aviation during the operating time, significantly less resource of aircraft engines of well-known brands. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that the use of general aviation automobile engines is economically ineffective due to a short resource and insufficient reliability. Originality. Modern automobile engines, despite their technical perfection, cannot be used in aviation, since they do not correspond to aviation operating conditions. At the same time, adaptation of automobile engines to aviation applications is possible, but requires significant design changes, which makes their single use, as a rule, technically impractical and economically ineffective. Practical value. Due to the fact that saving on an aircraft engine is unacceptable from the point of view of flight safety, the aviation use of automobile engines without special modernization carries excessive risks of failures and their consequences. As a result, serial aircraft engines Lycoming, Continental, Jabiru, ULPower, Rotax, Limbach and others have virtually no alternative in general aviation.

INTRODUCTION: In-flight medical emergencies (IFMEs) average 1 of every 604 flights and are expected to increase as the population ages and air travel increases. Flight diversions, or the rerouting of a flight to an alternate destination, occur in 2 to 13% of IFME cases, but may or may not be necessary as determined after the fact. Estimating the effect of IFME diversions compared to nonmedical diversions can be expected to improve our understanding of their impact and allow for more appropriate decision making during IFMEs.METHODS: The current study matched multiple disparate datasets, including medical data, flight plan and track data, passenger statistics, and financial data. Chi-squared analysis and independent samples t-tests compared diversion delays and costs metrics between flights diverted for medical vs. nonmedical reasons. Data were restricted to domestic flights between 1/1/2018 and 6/30/2019.RESULTS: Over 70% of diverted flights recover (continue on to their intended destination after diverting); however, flights diverted due to IFMEs recover more often and more quickly than do flights diverted for nonmedical reasons. IFME diversions introduce less delay overall and cost less in terms of direct operating costs and passenger value of time (averaging around 38,000) than do flights diverted for nonmedical reasons.DISCUSSION: Flights diverted due to IFMEs appear to have less impact overall than do flights diverted for nonmedical reasons. However, the lack of information related to costs for nonrecovered flights and the decision factors involved during nonmedical diversions hinders our ability to offer further insights.Lewis BA, Gawron VJ, Esmaeilzadeh E, Mayer RH, Moreno-Hines F, Nerwich N, Alves PM. Data-driven estimation of the impact of diversions due to in-flight medical emergencies on flight delay and aircraft operating costs. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2021; 92(2):99105.

BACKGROUND: In helicopter critical care and emergency medical services (HEMS) transportation, organizations aim for efficiency of the dispatch process. Most HEMS organizations do not provide transport under instrument flight rules (IFR), due to equipment and training cost. Boston MedFlight (BMF) provides IFR HEMS transport. We set out to determine if response time of IFR transport was superior to ground transport.METHODS: A retrospective analysis of quality improvement data was performed. Data was collected by two observers sitting in the BMF control room in varying shifts. A process map of the dispatch process, from the dispatch call to the vehicle en route was developed. Critical points in the dispatch process were determined and a variety of time differences to determine the length of processes in the dispatch calculated. We compared median time differences between visual flight rules (VFR) flight and IFR flight, between IFR flight and ground transport, and between VFR and Ground for these points using a Mann-Whitney U-test.RESULTS: During the study collection period, 443 transports occurred, of which 109 transports happened while the observers were present: 37 ground, 57 VFR, and 15 IFR. Due to weather, six IFR transports were declined. The overall time from dispatch call to vehicle en route was significantly increased for IFR flights [median: 30 min:8 s (interquartile range 19:06–49:04)] over both VFR flights [11:36 (9:24–17:06); P vs. IFR: 0.001] and ground transports [9:39 (6:59–14.51); P vs. IFR: 0.001]. Most of this increase was accounted for by increases in the time from dispatch to crew acceptance, and from rotor start to vehicle en route.DISCUSSION: IFR conditions resulted in significantly increased dispatch times over both VFR flight and ground transport. The increase is likely a result of weather check, filing an IFR flight plan, and IFR release. Dispatch algorithms should be adjusted for this time delay of IFR transports.Kamine TH, Thomas L, Davis C, Cohen J. Critical care transport time differences between ground, helicopter VFR, and helicopter IFR transports. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2020; 91(2):98–101.

Disaster response activities include various aircraft, many of which operate under visual flight rules (VFR) when performing reconnaissance, search and rescue missions. When flying in visual conditions, the pilot keeps their eyes out of the cockpit and looks for other traffic to operate the aircraft and avoid collisions. The trajectory of the aircraft is mostly determined by the pilot’s manual control as well, and since the flight plan submitted before departure contains only very limited information, strategic trajectory planning is not possible. Recent technology developments, however, have shown the potential of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) in reconnaissance. For both manned and unmanned aircraft to perform their missions safely and efficiently, a more efficient airspace allocation and potential segregation is necessary. This in turn requires strategic VFR trajectory modeling. In this research we consider potential parameters which define the VFR flight reconnaissance mission trajectory by analyzing helicopter flight data. As an initial step of the VFR flight model development, here we consider time, lateral and vertical trajectory modeling and identify necessary parameters to be distance from the target landmark, altitude, and view angle. The trajectory model assumptions are verified through flight data obtained from JAXA’s helicopter flight tests conducted in November 2020, which modeled real reconnaissance missions. Results confirm the feasibility of the model assumptions and set directions for future research.

Among flight crew errors, 54% occurred in the taxiing phase, especially near intersections in low visibility situations. This paper examines pilots' scanning behavior when executing different turning maneuvers at airport intersections both on clear days and in low visibility situations. The Beijing International Airport was reconstructed in an Airbus 320 simulator. Eight male pilots participated in this study. The pilots were required to take full manual control from the last approach point and to taxi according to the predetermined flight plan. The pilots' fixation rate, average fixation duration, and dwell time percentage in each area of interest (AOI) were analyzed during the turning maneuvers near four examined intersections. The results showed that the dwell time percentages in the electronic centralized aircraft monitoring (ECAM) area when executing right turn maneuvers were significantly higher than those when executing left turn maneuvers on clear days. In low visibility situations, the percentages of dwell time in the right view out of the window (OTWR) area when executing right turn maneuvers were significantly higher than those when executing left turn maneuvers. To examine if the scanning behavior reported in this study is safe or not, the pilots' responses to potentially dangerous situations should be further studied.

Currently, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) is the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) vision for air traffic management below 400 feet. Production UTM systems tend to reside only at specialized test sites and operational centers. UTM has been articulated as a concept of operation (ConOps) by the FAA. The UTM ConOps describes a complex interaction between UAS, UAS Operators, and the UTM system itself. These interactions may involve human operators, or be fully automated. Currently, most UTM studies and experimental prototypes do not look at the UTM concept from end-to-end; instead, they focus on specific aspects of UTM and thus cannot explore and test the holistic performance of a UTM ecosystem. Equally important is ensuring that production UTM can scale to meet the demands of future airspace, which is estimated to be 65,000 UAS operations (takeoffs and landings) per hour by 2035. The busiest US airports currently handle 300 operations per hour.In this paper, we evaluate a portion of the UTM system using a set of autonomous algorithms for flight plan de-confliction. Preliminary results suggest that the autonomy algorithms used for path planning, strategic de-confliction, and detect and avoid (DAA) are capable of scaling to high-congestion scenarios while drastically reducing collisions between UAS, even with almost all UAS deviating from de-conflicted plans (i.e., rogue UAS). We also observed that de-confliction algorithms represent a dominating safety layer in the separation hierarchy, since the strategic de-confliction algorithms manage airspace density, albeit at the cost of longer mission completion times. Our testing was done using a MATLAB simulator, which used the RRT* algorithm for flight planning, two different schedulers (Genetic Algorithm and the NASA Stratway Strategic Conflict Resolution algorithm) for strategic de-confliction, and the Airborne Collision Avoidance System for small unmanned aircraft systems (ACAS sXu) for DAA.

NASA's UAS Traffic Management (UTM) concept proposes a federated, service-based traffic management system for small UAS operating at altitudes below 400 feet. Under this concept, private entities operate UTM Service Suppliers (USS) and are responsible for approval, coordination, and deconfliction of flight plans submitted by mission operators. Due to unforeseen factors, any number of off-nominal conditions could force a participating vehicle to stray from the approved flight plan and become non-conforming. NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) conducted a series of flight tests referred to as Pathfinder 1 to demonstrate the use of onboard autonomy-enabling technologies in scenarios where a non-conforming UAS flies through the assigned airspace of another vehicle while trying to reach an emergency landing site. Two test vehicles were equipped with an onboard autonomy software developed at NASA LaRC referred to as ICAROUS (Independent Configurable Architecture for Reliable Operation of Unmanned Systems). ICAROUS's autonomous sense and avoid (SAA) and geofence conformance capabilities were tested and demonstrated in the Pathfinder 1 flight tests. In these flight tests, the two aircraft initially follow flight plans that have been previously approved by a USS and determined to be conflict-free. During the flight, a scripted emergency scenario is triggered, requiring one vehicle to make an emergency landing using an onboard application named Safe2Ditch to select the best landing site. A straight-line path to the landing site would cause the UAS to become non-conforming and cross directly through the airspace of the other UAS, creating an elevated risk of collision. Two methods of autonomous onboard conflict resolution were tested to resolve this scenario and prevent collision. In the first method, the nonconforming vehicle flew directly to the landing site, passing through the airspace of the conforming vehicle. The conforming vehicle used ICAROUS's SAA capability to autonomously deviate from its flight plan to maintain a well-clear distance of 500 feet then returned to the flight plan once the conflict had passed. In the second resolution method, a keep-out geofence was placed 500 feet around the flight plan of the conforming vehicle. The non-conforming vehicle used ICAROUS to plan a route to the landing site that respected the geofence and thus maintained a safe separation from the airspace of the conforming vehicle. This paper also reports on the use of FLARM (Flight Alarm), a vehicle-to-vehicle position communication technology that transmits on 915 MHz, to provide traffic vehicle position data for onboard SAA.

Over the past ten years there has been a substantial growth in the expenditure of quadcopter drones. Whilst the greatest expense remains with the military, drones are finding increased use in commercial applications such as construction, agriculture, oil and gas and cinematography. However, a major shortcoming of the quadcopter drone is its limited flight time of 30 minutes. Recharging and replacing batteries, significantly impedes and interrupts the desired drone mission. A possible solution is to deploy a number of drones connected and communicating over a network enabling greater area coverage for the same flight time. This paper describes the development of a multiple drone network constructed from commercially available drones. A single autonomous drone is initially constructed which is able to follow a predefined flight plan. The single autonomous drone is developed to enable the formation of a network with other similarly constructed autonomous drones. Flight command codes are able to be transmitted between drones to instruct the receiving drone to fly a particular flight path. Results presented confirm the performance of the controlled flightpath of the autonomous drone and the ability to pass flight command codes between drones across the network.

Introduction: The extremely low accident rate for U.S air carriers relative to that of general aviation (∼1 and ∼60/million flight hours respectively) partly reflects advanced airman certification, more demanding recurrency training and stringent operational regulations. However, whether such skillset/training/regulations translate into improved safety for airline pilots operating in the general aviation environment is unknown and the aim of this study. Methods: Accidents (1998–2017) involving airline pilots and instrument-rated private pilots (PPL-IFR) operating non-revenue light aircraft were identified from the NTSB accident database. An online survey informed general aviation flight exposure for both pilot cohorts. Statistics used proportion testing and Mann-Whitney U tests. Results: In degraded visibility, 0 and 40% (χ2 p = 0.043) of fatal accidents involving airline and PPL-IFR airmen were due to in-flight loss-of-control, respectively. For landing accidents, airline pilots were under-represented for mishaps related to airspeed mismanagement (p = 0.036) relative to PPL-IFR but showed a dis-proportionate count (2X) of ground loss-of-directional control accidents (p = 0.009) the latter likely reflecting a preference for tail-wheel aircraft. The proportion of FAA rule violation-related mishaps by airline pilots was >2X (7 vs. 3%) that for PPL-IFR airmen. Moreover, airline pilots showed a disproportionate (χ2 p = 0.021) count of flights below legal minimum altitudes. Not performing an official preflight weather briefing or intentionally operating in instrument conditions without an IFR flight plan represented 43% of airline pilot accidents involving FAA rule infractions. Conclusions: These findings inform safety deficiencies for: (a) airline pilots, landing/ground operations in tail-wheel aircraft and lack of 14CFR 91 familiarization regulations regarding minimum operating altitudes and (b) PPL-IFR airmen in-flight loss-of-control and poor landing speed management. Practical Applications: For PPL-IFR airmen, training/recurrency should focus on unusual attitude recovery and managing approach speeds. Airline pilots should seek additional instructional time regarding landing tail-wheel aircraft and become familiar with 14CFR 91 rules covering minimum altitudes.

General aviation flights are always task-oriented and thus have more maneuvering than transportation flights. These complex trajectories have intrinsic difficulties to fit in the current common used flight plans, although which is suitable for transportation flights. A task-dependent flight plan is proposed to address this issue. The proposed flight plan can provide the general aviation operators, pilots and the safety administrators of the airspace a better description and interpretation of general aviation flights at the planning stage. By exploiting this kind of flight plan, a conflict risk assessment method is also proposed, aiming to quantitate the conflict risk level for a general aviation operation airspace. This method introduces uncertainty by employing time variance for the flight plans’ operation. Simulation results demonstrate that this proposed method is capable of providing measurements of conflict risk of the airspace as well as operational advisories.

Pengiriman flight plan dari Bandar udara Temindung Samarinda ke Bandar udara Sepinggan Balikpapan terkadang gagal dikarenakan berbagai hal seperti putusnya jalur komunikasi atau kegagalan fasilitas penunjang yang lainnya yaitu VSAT. Sehingga apabila data flight plan dari BO Samarinda ke BO Balikpapan tidak terkirim, maka BO Samarinda akan mengirim ulang flight plan tersebut. Tujuan perancangan untuk membuat aplikasi yang dapat memonitor flight plan pada tower di Bandar Udara Temindung Samarinda dan untuk menghasilkan alat yang dapat mengirimkan notifikasi ke teknisi bila terjadi gangguan pada jaringan AFTN. Metode perancangan menggunakan komponen mikrokontroler, modul GSM, dan aplikasi Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Hasil perancangan menunjukan simulasi alat tersebut akan mampu memberikan gambaran mengenai system monitoring pengiriman flight plan yang terkirim maupun diterima di Bandara Temindung Samarinda

Since the airspace is subordinated to the territories of different states, different authorities, such as Eurocontrol in Europe and FAA in America, etc., an acute need for a product that would provide easy, fast, high-quality flight planning, their proper dissemination, formation of necessary documents, etc. arises. Purpose is to cluster all necessary planning flights items, functions, united informational system data. This system is designed to ease flight plan description in Eurocontrol database etc., provide its correct dissemination to all controllers, towers, airports etc. This project will help to omit difficult and long-lasting phone calls, automate and optimize flight plan rendering, provide with high data accuracy. The pilot also can easily check the weather at the airports during the flight. Adding all necessary characteristics of the plane, the system will calculate fuel consumption for all approved flights. Besides, all available and necessary documents will be established into unified document or database. Object study is aviation aircrafts flights planning. Subject study is aviation aircraft planning informational system project development. Novelties are few programs nowadays, which could rapidly, easily and qualitatively schedule aviation aircrafts flights of general-purpose. Many programs are very narrow focused and don’t give access to full functionality, others are highly expensive to operate them. So, this informational system project will be multifunctional and of high quality at the same time which cause its enormous demand. Flights planning aviation aircrafts of general-purpose informational system project will have enormous demand all across the globe. However, Europe would be the dominant user since airspace is under vigilant superintendence of Eurocontrol and number of rules, prohibitions and requirements covers these lands. Created application ensures easy and fast itinerary scheduling around the most problematical areas of Europe.

Using mobile devices for various flight planning tasks is becoming the norm among general aviation (GA) pilots. Mobile apps, such as ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot, provide services such as flight plan filing, electronic charts, and weather briefings, but time-consuming and error-prone voice-based methods must still be used to exchange clearance information with air traffic control (ATC). The ubiquity of mobile device and app use by pilots suggests that mobile applications could also be used to deliver Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) clearances and provide other traditionally voice-based services. This concept proposes that pilots will be able to exchange pre-departure and post-arrival information electronically at both towered and non-towered airports in the United States (U.S.), without speaking a single word. Similar to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) technology known as Data Communications (DataComm), used to supplement verbal communication with digitally delivered messages [1], mobile devices may provide an affordable option to GA pilots for pre-departure and post-arrival electronic information exchange. Both implementations provide a significant reduction in pilot and controller workload for the services they enable. Electronic information exchange may eliminate read-back errors and incorrect interpretations of spoken clearances for controllers across the country and the over 300,000 instrument-rated pilots in the U.S. (as of December 31, 2018) [2] to whom they deliver clearances. The concept consists of four parts: providing IFR clearance delivery, negotiating IFR release at non-towered airports, exchanging other pre-departure information, and cancelling IFR at non-towered airports. The MITRE Corporation (MITRE) created a research prototype, using flight plan information from the FAA's System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Flight Data Publication Service (SFDPS), to evaluate the concept's operational acceptability and investigate resulting benefits. It is expected that a fully electronic information exchange will significantly reduce pilot and controller workload. However, before the concept can be implemented as a capability available to users of the National Airspace System (NAS), some preliminary steps must be taken by the FAA, in conjunction with industry, to validate the concept to ensure success. In the summer of 2018, we partnered with ForeFlight, an electronic flight bag (EFB) technology provider, to design and conduct a 75-day field test of the mobile clearance delivery concept at Manassas Regional Airport (HEF). This study focused strictly on clearance delivery at a towered airport and was designed to be transparent to ATC. Participation in the test was available to pilots on a voluntary basis; pilots who opted into the study received an email from ForeFlight with expected clearance information. The goal was two-fold: 1) to show that it is possible for automation to generate accurate expected clearance information by comparing automatically generated clearances to the clearances provided verbally to pilots, and 2) to collect feedback from end users on the accuracy and acceptability of an electronic clearance delivery concept. Pilot subject matter experts listened to recordings for over 30 percent of the flights processed during the test period and compared the recorded clearances to the MITRE-generated data. The MITRE project team also reviewed subjective feedback from test participants. This field test successfully demonstrated that it is feasible to use SWIM data to formulate expected clearances and transmit that information to the pilot. Although we identified some mismatches between formulated clearance data and controller verbally issued clearances, analysis of the collected data allowed the team to determine the changes required to correct these mismatches and reliably send accurate clearance data to the pilot. Following the field test, we conducted table-top exercises to further explore the accuracy and effectiveness of delivering clearance information using a streamlined process that required minimal verbal exchange. We are also examining the end-to-end safety and cybersecurity implications of using mobile devices to exchange clearance information and will provide recommendations for developing a methodology to provide the assurance and security of data transmissions for mobile devices to enable these IFR services for GA pilots. Through these activities, we have identified challenges to making the mobile IFR services concept a reality. The most profound challenges are related to limitations within NAS systems, a mismatch between procedures and adaptation, and data elements that are unavailable to external systems. These technical challenges must be mitigated or overcome to enable these mobile IFR services.

The evolution of automation on the modern airliner flight deck has resulted in a "stack" of functions that has been incrementally "layered" over time to support the flight crew in performing the mission. The stack includes automation functions for: (1) Stability Augmentation and Engine Control for instantaneous control of aerodynamic control surfaces and engines, (2) Autopilot and Autothrottle for tactical control of the trajectory, and (3) Flight Management for strategic flight plan path management and optimization. By engaging/disengaging these functions there are up to 16 combinations of automation function configurations that can be engaged at any time. Due to the evolutionary development of the flight deck, the engagement status of the combination of functions is annunciated in an adhoc, distributed fashion across the flight deck displays. There is no single display of the consolidated automation function configuration.Analysis of the accident scenarios for Controlled Flight into Stall (CFIS) accidents identified a category of accident in which an automation function (e.g. Autothrottle) autonomously dis-engaged without flight crew action. This resulted in the automation flying the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall. Without salient notification of the engagement status change, the flight crew’s ability to mitigate the scenario in a timely manner was curtailed.This paper describes the requirements, design and test plan to provide a single synoptic display of the consolidated automation function configuration status. The display appears whenever a configuration change occurs, otherwise it remains hidden. The implications and limitations of this design are discussed.

A drone would take some waiting time to change its own flight route to the new route called re-routing time. To control the drone with the best flight plan, we have to estimate some re-route costs when the drone wants to change the course and direction according to the updated waypoint flight plan. In this work, we designed and implemented a flight monitoring program in the existing drone mission control app to measure the re-routing costs for various re-routing cases, and established the re-routing cost estimation method for the inflight drone that can expect the re-route costs. The inflight re-route cost includes the time and distance to change the preset route into a new route according to the drone flight speed and direction by waypoint in the middle of the drone flight. To measure the costs of the inflight drone re-routing method, we modified the waypoint flight planning module in the drone mission control app. The modified mission control app transmits the new waypoint data and receives the drone flight information with several flight data through the link communication. We tried many cases of the inflight re-routing with waypoint mission control under the various drone speeds and new waypoint directions and collected the flight factors through the flight monitoring program checks the costs for the inflight drone re-routing process. The experimental results show that total re-routing time and total re-routing flight distance have some kind of linear relations with the re-routing direction and flight speed at all. The experimental results also showed that the re-route cost can be estimated from the linear function relation with the new waypoint direction and the flight speed.

Japan Unmanned System Traffic & Radio Management Consortium conducted a large flight demonstration and made about 120 flights of 20 small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), which includes one simulated aircraft, in October 2017. All the flights were under a traffic management, and all the operators submitted a flight plan, reserved an airspace and followed the navigation of the controller. This paper describes the overview of a concept of UAS traffic management (UTM) and the demonstration, and discusses the feasibility and challenges of the UTM concept.

With the EVA completed and the hatches safely sealed again, the crew was instructed to allow Gemini 4 to drift and therefore conserve the spacecraft’s propellants. This mode was maintained for the next two-and-a-half days. As a result, the flight plan was continually updated and amended, as a number of operational checks and experiments were scheduled then rescheduled as necessary in real-time. The crew was required to monitor a variety of terrestrial objects or targets and orientate the spacecraft, depending upon the attitude it happened to be in at the time. This affected their performance when operating the experiments and conducting the various checks required throughout the remainder of the mission. A direct result of this was that many of the planned experiments and checks had to be rescheduled to later phases of the mission, when fuel consumption restrictions were lifted. These real-time planning amendments also meant rescheduling the crew’s sleep cycles to suit the new requirements, which in turn required further re-planning of activities around the new sleep periods. While challenging for both the crew and the flight controllers, this was a valuable lesson learnt and clearly revealed the realities of long-duration spaceflight.

Orbit by orbit, hour by hour, the mission ticked away, with the astronauts progressing through the flight plan and adapting not only to working in Gemini but also to living inside its cramped confines. There were challenges for the ground controllers in the MCC as well. Stuck inside a windowless building for hours on end, they were free from the humid heat of a Houston summer day but not from the stresses of constantly monitoring their consoles to ensure that all was proceeding well. But there were moments of levity as well. At one point, the Blue Team Operations and Procedures Officer, Jim Timberland, called the control room to inform them that “if you need me, I’ll be at [this] extension.” Confused, the other person asked “Where’s that?” Timberland replied “In the front elevator – stuck.” Fortunately, he was not stuck there for long and was soon back at his console.

Civil aviation is developing rapidly, and the number of domestic and international operations is increasing exponentially every year than the previous one. Airline companies with increased air traffic and the number of passengers increase the demand of new aircrafts. An aircraft needs not only fuel but also pilot and aeronautical information (charts, digital navigation information, flight plan, and etc.) to perform flight operation. One of the most important components in aeronautical information is the terminal chart. Authorized institution in every state is responsible to publish their terminal charts for certain periods. Although these charts are produced in accordance with ICAO’s Annex 4 and Annex 15, cartographic representation and page layout differs in each state’s publication. This situation makes difficult to read them by pilots. In this paper, standard instrument departure (SID) charts are analysed to produce by use of cutting-edge and competitive technologies instead of classical computer-aided drawing and vector based graphic applications that are currently used by main chart producers. The goal is to design efficient and commercial chart management system that is able to produce aeronautical charts with same cartographic representation for all states.

This chapter explores the world of dispatch and flight following as it pertains to airline operations, primarily from a US perspective. The Flight Dispatcher is responsible for monitoring the progress of each flight, issuing necessary information for the safety of the flight, and cancelling or re-dispatching the flight if, in the opinion of the Flight Dispatcher or the Captain, the flight cannot operate or continue to operate safely as planned. Planned re-dispatch is flight planning to an intermediate destination with a plan to recalculate fuel required while en route to allow the flight to continue on to the final destination. Flights under planned re-dispatch essentially operate with two flight plans. The first is the original flight plan from origin departure airport to the intermediate destination airport, and the second flight plan is from a re-dispatch fix or waypoint to the final destination airport.

In the framework of the National program for improving Small and Medium Enterprises industrial competitiveness, the Italian Space Agency funded the project AIRONE aiming to demonstrate an innovative European satellite-based weather service and related pilot decision supporting tools, to be included in a Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) system tailored for the General Aviation market. The proposed system needs a weather ground-based processor and a satellite communication link for sending the weather and other information to the on-board avionics for local processing and visualization. Moreover, the on-board avionics can assist the pilot in adjusting the flight plan, by on-line suggesting modifications to the current route. This paper describes the objectives and the related development and testing activities carried out for the AIRONE project as well as the flying demonstration results obtained.

Drivers for NAS Infrastructure for UAS . Planning NAS Infrastructure for UAS . Top-down vs bottom-up approach . Growth excitement vs. cost restraints . Building Blocks . UAS pilot to ATC controller voice & data COM . C2 & spectrum management . UAS flight plan, and UAS flight data information

This paper presents the setup, the assessment methods, and the results of a flight trial that was conducted in June 2016 in order to demonstrate integration of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) into the current airspace, while also acknowledging that there are challenges to overcome. An RPAS demonstrator received a flight plan from the ground control station (GCS) using a ground-based data link, departing from Braunschweig-Wolfsburg airport and flying towards Leipzig/Halle airport on published routing. When approaching Leipzig/Halle airport, the data link was lost as predicted, and the arrival procedure was altered by air traffic control (ATC), which showed that an additional and dedicated RPAS controller at arrival airports might be valuable and advantageous. Focus of this paper is the description of the components that were used during the trial and their interconnectivity, the evaluation of quantitative recorded data and the qualitative experienced difficulties and challenges. Assessment of the recorded data is divided into data link quality, data link latency, and flight following performance (vertical and lateral following accuracy), with the latter being linked to existing performance based navigation (PBN) parameters by ICAO and height-keeping performance values by EASA. The paper concludes with a discussion on the investigated integration concept.

The present-day fighter pilot is desired to have maximum awareness of his surroundings despite the excessive workload in a highly dynamic environment. So, it is necessary to provide him decision aiding tools that can help him perform the tasks without compromising on his mission. In-flight Route Replanning under High threat Air defence system is one such aid as part of the Decision Support System (DSS) that assists the pilot in evaluating the flight plan routes. It suggests alternate routes while flying in a hostile environment with ground based threats and incorporates survivability analysis to provide the probability of survival figure in a route encountered with threats. The best suited algorithm is surveyed and selected for the route replanning to escape threat encounter. Survivability of the replanned route is calculated to assert the benefit of replanning. The complete model is developed as simulation software which can analyse static threats with predefined lethalities intersecting the flight plan. The DSS is updated in real-time with the aircraft model developed in Flight Gear Flight Simulation software.

This study develops a trajectory optimization algorithm for approximately minimizing aircraft travel time and fuel burn by combining a method for computing minimum-time routes in winds on multiple horizontal planes, and an aircraft fuel burn model for generating fuel-optimal vertical profiles. It is applied to assess the potential benefits of flying user-preferred routes for commercial cargo flights operating between Anchorage, Alaska and major airports in Asia and the contiguous United States. Flying wind optimal trajectories with a fuel-optimal vertical profile reduces average fuel burn of international flights cruising at a single altitude by 1-3 percent. The potential fuel savings of performing en-route step climbs are not significant for many shorter domestic cargo flights that have only one step climb. Wind-optimal trajectories reduce fuel burn and travel time relative to the flight plan route by up to 3 percent for the domestic cargo flights. However, for trans-oceanic traffic, the fuel burn savings could be as much as 10 percent. The actual savings in operations will vary from the simulation results due to differences in the aircraft models and user defined cost indices. In general, the savings are proportional to trip length, and depend on the en-route wind conditions and aircraft types.

In the first step of the second phase of Chinas manned space program, China independently developed Tiangong-1, Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 spacecrafts. Through three in-orbit spaceflight missions, China successfully completed eight rendezvous and six docking missions covering various autonomous and manual modes of rendezvous and docking (RVD), and eventually made a breakthrough and mastered the RVD technology. From the aspects of RVD system, rendezvous orbit, rendezvous measurement and control, information transmission, docking and separation, flight plan and experimental verifications, this paper introduces the technology characteristics, innovation technology methods, and technical problems solved in Chinas RVD. Based on the flight tests, this paper also analyzes the achievements made by the mission and compares them with international levels. Finally the design and development conditions of Chinas RVD technology are summarized.

The article describes preliminary results of the augmentation of Global Navigation Satellite System/Inertial Navigation System positioning (GNSS/INS) by Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on the data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) and data from field survey. The prototype software is developed to refer the position of the aircraft to DEM and informs the user about the current relevant flight parameters. The number of the parameters may be arbitrarily increased, however, currently we investigate the altitude above the terrain and the aircraft position relative to the descent path and airfield. The study provides some information on the local SRTM accuracy in relation to the field survey of the airfield "Dajtki" – Aeroclub of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn. Keywords: GNSS, GNSS/INS, air navigation, STRM – Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, DEM – Digital Elevation Model. 1. INTRODUCTION It is estimated that about one-third of serious accidents involving aircraft transport is the result of hitting the Earth's surface by a plane performing completely smooth and normal flight plan, run by well-prepared and efficient staff, these accidents are commonly called CFIT - Controlled Flight Into Terrain. One of the tragic example of CFIT accident is a crash of a Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M aircraft in Smolensk (Russia), killing 96 people including President of Poland and his wife in April 2010. Since the beginning of commercial jet operations, more than 9,000 people have died worldwide because of CFIT. What’s more, CFIT accidents lead amongst all other air transport accident types and result in the greatest number of fatalities. It is estimated that CFIT accidents comprise about 25% of the total accidents and cause about 32% of the fatalities (ALAR Tool Kit, 2001). (ALAR stands for Approach and Landing Accident Reduction and it has been among the primary goals of the Flight Safety Foundation – FSF). It has also been estimated that about two-thirds of the accidents occur within eight miles of the runway with the majority of them occurring within three miles of the runway. Figure 1 presents vertical profiles of some recent CFIT accidents/incidents. In all of them there was a lack of vertical situation awareness. This leads

Aiming at runway incursions, an early warning model of airfield lighting for runway incursions based on fusing the surface monitoring information is researched. The type and category of runway incursions models are established. The type and category of runway incursions are judged from the target position and velocity estimated through the integration of surface radar, approach radar and flight plan data. The warning for runway incursions is displayed to pilots or vehicle crew by runway warning lights, which is uploaded to the tower. The result of experiments shows that the early warning model is feasible for the warning of runway incursions.

The preflight, flight planning, and briefing task is critical both from an operational and a safety and human factors perspective. This article reports on research related to the advancement of a qualitative model of this task (i.e., normal practice and its challenges), along with the requirements for best practice in briefing. An analysis of this model suggests certain process and information technology requirements necessary for the implementation of improved briefings at an operational level. It is argued that by changing the flight operations process and in particular, changing what information is communicated to flight crew in the flight plan and how it is communicated (i.e., electronic format), it is possible to transform the way the preflight, flight planning, and briefing task is performed for the better.

Air traffic forecasting is important as it helps stakeholders to plan their budgets and facilities. Thus, three most commonly used forecasting models were compared to see which model suited the air passenger traffic the best. General forecasting equations were also created to forecast the passenger traffic. The equations could forecast around 6.0% growth from 2015 onwards. Another study sought to provide an initial work for determining a theoretical airspace load with relevant calculations. The air traffic was simulated to investigate the current airspace load. Logical and reasonable results were obtained from the modelling and simulations. The current utilization percentages for airspace load per hour and the static airspace load in the interested airspace were found to be 6.64% and 11.21% respectively. Our research also studied how ADS-B would affect the time taken for aircraft to travel. 6000 flights departing from and landing at the airport were studied. New flight plans were simulated with improved flight paths due to the implementation of ADS-B, and flight times of all studied flights could be improved. Published version

Unmanned airspace access is a key topic to enable unmanned flights in the U.S. National Airspace System. Above the 400-foot AGL limit, unmanned operations need special care and systems to fly safely and reliably. For autonomous flights to be safe, regular parts of daily, economical operations, designs for both the greater airspace and specific avionics must be built on robust systems design principles. For unmanned systems with a predefined flight plan, it is possible to autonomously and safely fly above 400 feet AGL in manned airspace by interfacing with ADS-B out and under the control of a licensed pilot. Utah State University's AggieAir group has been flying autonomously in this manner for real remote sensing missions, and in this paper, design methodologies for aircraft/avionics systems, ground support equipment, as well as flight logistics and airspace data interfaces are described. Lastly, flight data under FAA Certificates of Authorization (COAs) above 400 feet AGL demonstrate AggieAir's safe operations in manned airspace.

This study is to develop a procedure to estimate the market share of itinerant GA operations (MSIGO) by aircraft type at an airport. The procedure can be used, for example, by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and airport planners to make projections of itinerant operations by aircraft type for airport planning and improvements. Our procedure consists of two sub-procedures. The first one is a national level logistic model which separates the MSIGO by three fixed-wing aircraft types (i.e., piston, turboprop, and turbofan) from the other aircraft types. The second sub-procedure includes an airport-level logistic model and a national level estimation model. The airport-level logistic model is to estimate the MSIGO by each of the three fixed-wing aircraft types under IFR flight plan. The national level estimation model is designed to estimate the MSIGO by aircraft type under all flight rules. We validated our procedure using the statistics reported in the Air Traffic Activity System. In addition, we applied our procedure to the projections of itinerant GA operations made by the FAA in the Terminal Area Forecasting. Based on our results for the towered airports, between 2013 and 2018, the number of itinerant operations by piston and turboprop would decline at about 0.2% per year, and the number of itinerant operations by turbofan and the other aircraft types would increase at 0.75% and 1.33% per year, respectively.

In response to the predicted increase in frequency and complexity of commercial launch and reentry operations, the FAA must continue its effort to develop integrated capabilities to meet the Administration’s objectives and realize the anticipated operational benefits of the integration of these operations into the National Airspace System (NAS). The Space Data Integrator (SDI) platform is such a capability that automates the FAA’s currently manual, time-consuming and resource-intensive procedures to support commercial launch and reentry operations. The objectives of the SDI are to allow for extending the operations’ planning to include filing a flight plan, to provide situational awareness to the Joint Space Operations Group (JSpOG) at the FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) on the launch and reentry vehicle position and mission parameters during the full operations, and to support the detection and response to abnormal events. The SDI is the result of a non-traditional approach for FAA that is flexible, with high-implementation readiness, directly tailored to the end-user needs, and both low-cost/low impact on existing NAS automation systems. The SDI can be used as a shadow system while continuing to mature, a training tool for the JSpOG personnel, and a familiarization tool for commercial space vehicle operators, spaceport representatives and air traffic control personnel.

After only four flights of one orbiter, the reusable space shuttle was declared operational and readied to fly its first commercial customers and a crew of four on STS-5 in 1982. Science fiction author Ben Bova, a member of the L-5 Society and the Planetary Society, endorsed the Space Operation Center concept. Anticipating a quick build up to flights once or twice a month and approval for a space station that would lead to a SOC, planning for downstream flights began in earnest, with an emphasis on pleasing the commercial customers at the expense of internal NASA and science payloads such as the Large Format Camera initially assigned to STS-11. The American Astronautical Society held its 29th annual meeting in October 1982. Military speakers opined that whoever controlled space controlled the surface of the Earth and that NASA was helping to keep the peace by increasing American prestige. The author shares her struggle to start a family amid the high stress world of flight control and taking flying lessons.

“After the initial sensation of weightlessness, it was exactly what I had expected from my brief experience with it in training. It was very pleasant, a great freedom, and I adapted to it quickly. Movement in the pressure suit was easier and the couch was more comfortable.”1

The flight planning process is the most critical time for the turbulence forecaster. It is the time that routes and altitudes are selected, and fuel is added for any necessary deviations. Aviation meteorologists can have a significant impact at this stage of flight planning. Internationally, flights are given preference for route and altitude selection based on the time the flight plan is filed. It is difficult for flights to change altitude once the flight plan has been accepted, since flights over the oceans cannot be seen on radar and have to be sequenced in space and time. If turbulence is not considered at the planning stage, altitude deviations for turbulence may not be allowed if there are other aircraft above and below the flight. Therefore, advanced knowledge of turbulence gives the advantage to the airlines that forecast turbulence accurately.

During the fifth flight of the space shuttle, a fire in Mission Control took down the Mission Operations Computer, cutting off command and communications with the orbiter. The author (one month pregnant at the time) was on console as a Flight Activities Officer during the event and relates how the team and NASA Public Affairs handled the emergency. The crew of Vance Brand, Bob Overmyer, Bill Lenoir, and Joe Allen were not aware of the event until after the fact. STS-5 deployed the first two communications satellites, a capability NASA proclaimed would allow the shuttle to become cost effective. One disappointment was that the first shuttle spacewalk was cancelled because of dual suit failures.

For a program as original and monumental as Project Mercury, very little is certain at the start. Nevertheless, management must have some clear direction from the top. President Eisenhower was very specific that he wanted a civilian space program in spite of the rather obvious military implications of Sputnik and the military’s pushing hard to manage the manned space program. His directive solved at least two problems immediately. It made it clear that NACA would get the space program instead of either the Army or Air Force. And by directing the Department of Defense to support the civilian space program Eisenhower relieved NACA of the need to come up with independent resources and personnel for launching and recovering flights.

“During the days immediately before the launch was first scheduled to go, I was tense and not at all at ease. I did not like the waiting, and I felt I needed more time to work on the flight plan and with the special equipment I would use.”1

The fourth flight of the space shuttle in July 1982 was the last of the Operational Flight Test Program and the first of a classified military payload controlled by the Air Force out of Sunnyvale, CA. The author served as a Flight Activities Officer on the Entry Team in Mission Control, responsible for crew procedures, schedule, and vehicle attitude and pointing. On the first day of the flight, the secret payload DOD 82-1 sustained a failure, the details of which could not be discussed except on a secure phone line that failed early in the flight and uncovered weaknesses in supporting secure operations. The crew, T. K. Mattingly and Hank Hartsfield, instituted a space suit demo that hadn’t been coordinated with the flight control teams preflight, uncovering communication issues that needed to be solved prior to the first shuttle spacewalk, then planned for STS-5. Gene Kranz used the amount of teleprinter paper required to update the crew as an example of why an electronic system was needed to communicate with the orbiter in space. The author and her husband, who was a Guidance Officer on this flight, became the first married couple to both work consoles in the Mission Operations Control Room.

Five days after he had orbited the Earth three times, a man who once believed he was failing a university course in heat transference told professors at the University of Colorado what it was like to pass through extremely high temperatures, at times bordering on around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wally Schirra almost didn’t make it. Having shed a few excess pounds during tough and invasive physical and psychological testing at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the next step in the Mercury astronaut selection process involved stress testing together with his fellow 31 candidates at the Wright-Patterson Aero Medical Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. For a brief time, and much to his consternation, Schirra thought he had been scrubbed out of contention because of a previously undiagnosed medical condition.

As a result of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are expected to be integrated into the National Airspace System (NAS) by 2015. Several human factors challenges need to be addressed before UAS can safely and routinely fly in the NAS with manned aircraft. Perhaps the most significant challenge is for the UAS to be non-disruptive to the air traffic management system. Another human factors challenge is how to provide UAS pilots with intuitive traffic information in order to support situation awareness (SA) of their airspace environment as well as a see-and-avoid capability comparable to manned aircraft so that a UAS pilot could safely maneuver the aircraft to maintain separation and collision avoidance if necessary. A simulation experiment was conducted to examine baseline compliance of UAS operations in the current airspace system. Researchers also examined the effects of introducing a Cockpit Situation Display (CSD) into a UAS Ground Control Station (GCS) on UAS pilot performance, workload and situation awareness while flying in a positively controlled sector. Pilots were tasked with conducting a highway patrol police mission with a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAS in L.A. Center airspace with two mission objectives: 1) to reroute the UAS when issued new instructions from their commander, and 2) to communicate with Air Traffic Control (ATC) to negotiate flight plan changes and respond to vectoring and altitude change instructions. Objective aircraft separation data, workload ratings, SA data, and subjective ratings regarding UAS operations in the NAS were collected. Results indicate that UAS pilots were able to comply appropriately with ATC instructions. In addition, the introduction of the CSD improved pilot SA and reduced workload associated with UAS and ATC interactions.

AustroMars was the simulation of a crewed expedition on the surface of planet Mars, taking place in April 2006 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah. Six carefully selected “analogue astronauts” (out of 184 candidates) performed 20 experiments in the fields of robotics, analogue planetary and life sciences as well as human exploration. During the 2-week mission, the MDRS served as base for their research activities and exploratory excursions. Modelled after selection and training principles of astronauts and pilots, although in a nutshell, the crew underwent a training including education in science and engineering skills as well as physical and mental training. A dense flight plan, physically challenging experiments (including extravehicular activities) and a complimentary set of human factors research experiments offered a unique opportunity to study the impact of a high workload on crew vigilance. The data presented here focus on the validated pupillographic sleepiness test, salivary assay data (such as DHEA, Cortisol, P17-OH, Fasting Insulin and MB2S), a complimentary set of reaction and cognitive function tests as well as a novel technique using eye movements as indicator for vigilance, the Fatigue Monitoring System FAMOS. The data of the 6-person simulated flight crew were complemented by pre/post-flight measurements as well as by 3 test subjects (back-up crew).

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”Niels BohrThe pace at which new technologies are assimilated into society is driven by trends in the regulatory, budgetary, and societal environments in addition to the pace of technology development itself. This study merges trends in these areas to develop an integrated forecast of the levels to which unmanned aviation can be expected to emerge in the military, air cargo, business, general aviation, and airline aviation segments over the coming 40 years. One out of every 80 aircraft on an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan over the US are anticipated in this forecast to be unmanned by 2025 and two out of nine (18 of every 80) by 2050. Portions of this study were originally researched in 2005 in support of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) for planning the Next Generation (NextGen) air traffic system and later presented at the 23rd Bristol UAV Systems Conference.

The following study examined pilots' performance on in-flight planning tasks in non-nominal and emergency conditions using autoflight systems capable of automatically generating a flight plan. The findings revealed that autoflight systems did not significantly impact replanning, while the scenarios did significantly affect the primary performance measures of distance flown and time of flight. Additionally, pilots selected the most direct route when possible and did not distinguish between emergency and non-nominal flight conditions. Pilots also favored use of the automatically generated flight plans. We conclude that: 1) automatic flight path generation benefits in-flight replanning primarily by reducing workload in emergencies; and 2) such a system will require real time access to environmental information, including traffic, weather and terrain, be considered simultaneously.

A number of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) automation systems and developmental programs interoperate to support the day-to-day operations of the National Airspace System (NAS). The integration of New Entrants (NEs), such as Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) 1 and Space Vehicle (SV) operations, into the NAS will require modification to the current state of automation. Examining the relevant operational, technical, and procedural implications of integrated NE operations, in addition to exploring the potential impacts of accelerated RPA usage on NAS dynamics, are critically important efforts necessary to understanding operational impacts to NAS systems and users. Our paper presents the potential impacts of RPA integration on two of these systems: En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) and Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS). A significant component of the impact on NAS systems comes from flight plan and related data processing since all SVs and many RPAs will fly non-standard flight patterns (e.g., RPA loitering and grid search). The processes and details of the non-traditional flight routes, as well different RPA performance specifications, need to be considered as missions are overlaid on the national jet route structure. Of particular concern and interest are the changes in air traffic control (ATC) and air traffic management (ATM) systems and sub-systems needed to address air traffic controller workload and workload complexity concerns associated with NE activities. One potential accommodation approach, presented in this paper, is the use of Dynamic Airspace Configuration both for RPA routine operations and contingency events. Additionally, we present an RPA 1 In this paper, UAS and RPA are used interchangeably without intending any difference per se. It is noted that the U.S. DoD and ICAO use RPA while NASA and the FAA use UAS. demand forecast tool developed under a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) project. This tool will assist the FAA in meeting its objectives for accommodation of RPA by providing accurate demand forecast information.

Hazardous weather can pose a significant threat to aircraft safety and may result in a substantial increase in crew workload, such as during departure manoeuvers. If the weather hazard conflicts with the flight plan, including the Standard Instrument Departure (SID) route, the pilots need to plan and execute an avoidance manoeuver. To date, this is still mostly a manual process, with the crew gathering information from multiple sources (including Air Traffic Control (ATC), weather forecasts and onboard weather radar returns) in order to determine an avoidance route.