New tool to identify green trajectories for aircraft
Minimising fuel consumption, harmful gas and noise emissions are important pillars of the EU's Clean Sky project to reduce the environmental impact of air traffic. Management of trajectories and missions enabled through green trajectories is a key approach to achieving the EU's 2020 goals. The green flight path concept can be partly enabled by the development at technology-readiness level 5 to 6 of FMSs and guidance algorithms that provide high-accuracy flight path prediction. However, integration of new flight management functions requires the enhancement of on-board databases to handle environmental parameters. The FLIP (Automatic flight plan management tool) project was initiated to enhance and automate the FMS testing process to include such innovative functions. Researchers developed a software tool compatible with an FMS test bench that extracts flight information from EU and United States databases and injects different flight path scenarios into the FMS. The databases used contained representative traffic and flight plans to and from the EU and the United States, including transatlantic flights. The Flight Information Exchange Model (FIXM) was selected for modelling exchange of flight data and representing flight plans. The FIXM simplifies the global exchange of data by providing a framework developed on international standards. This newly developed automatic flight data management tool, integrated with the FMS test bench, enables users to administrate the flight plan databases and visualise and test dedicated flight plans for different FMS scenarios. The new flight management functions encompassing all flight phases take into account new environmental parameters that will be handled by the future FMS. With this new software tool, FLIP contributed to integrating these new functions into the green FMS, providing the EU with a competitive edge in the avionics sector.
Keywords
Green trajectories, aircraft, green flight path, flight management system, flight plan
