SafeNcy - the safe emergency trajectory generator

Project Information

SafeNcy

Grant agreement ID: 864771

DOI

10.3030/864771

Project closed

EC signature date 7 October 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 1 342 907,50

EU contribution

€ 998 916,88

Coordinated by

FRANCE AVIATION CIVILE SERVICES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SafeNcy (SafeNcy - the safe emergency trajectory generator)

Reporting period: 2021-05-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The safety emergency trajectory for aircraft in degraded flyability mode does not exist except for Engine OUT SID (standard instrumental departure) situations where airliners have to develop specific flight procedure in an engine loss situation. The current process of defining emergency trajectories and landing sites remains completely manual and is fully relying on pilot capabilities of situation analysis.

FRANCE AVIATION CIVILE SERVICES (FRACS), CGX AERO, METSAFE, UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA (UPC), ENAC and EUROCONTROL propose through SafeNcy an automated support to the flight crew in emergency situations by providing the analysis of possible solutions to land the aircraft in classic and non-classic areas and with an unplanned trajectory.

The overall objective of the SafeNcy project is then to bring a support to the flight crewin the flight management and decision making in emergency situations with degraded aircraft capabilities. In particular:
- Gather and classify possible emergency landing sites and provide a nearby database of these possible landing sites for various use cases;
- Define a risk assessment methodology and propose recommendations related to the emergency landing of the aircraft for onboard part (aircraft, passengers…) and ground part (cities, dangerous ground sites…);
- Develop a landing site selection algorithm for a given situation including aircraft remaining capabilities, meteorological environment, and landing site suitability for the aircraft;
- Develop a trajectory generation algorithm computing the best trajectory between the current aircraft position and the selected landing site taking into account the situation, the environment and the evaluated risk;
- Ensure that, in the future, the new selected trajectory can be transferred into the aircraft FMS;
- Enhance and accelerate the decision-making process of emergency solutions definition for pilots without increasing their workload in such a critical situation.

At the end of the project, a system prototype has been developed, deployed in a test environment and validated using several specific scenarios. The TRL 5 has been reached and several axis of improvements have been raised in order to augment the TRL level.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

A system prototype has been developed and deployed in a test environment. This system is composed of the following components:
- A landing site generation module, gathering a landing site database classifying the landing sites in six categories depending on specific criteria, including suitability for aircraft, meteo and accessibility. An algorithm has been developed to identify "off-airport" landing sites. This algorithm will have to be refined to augment the TRL level, recommandation for future use has been issued.
- A trajectory generation module computing the best trajectory between the current aircraft position and the selected landing site taking into account the situation, the environment and aircraft performances
- A meteorological web service, providing weather information used for the landing site selection and the trajectory generation. In particular, a "pseudo-METAR" service has been developed, providing METAR-like information on any location.
- An ad-hoc simulator aiming at defining and playing emergency situations in order to test the system.
The system has been tested using seven emergency scenarios and the results have been studied by the Advisory Board. Recommendations to augment the TRL level of the system have been raised and documented.
As part of the validation tests, the trajectories generated by the SafeNcy system have been exported and ingested into a simulated Flight Management System. Some work remains to do on the trajectories in order for the FMS to fully treat them.

A Safety Risk Assessment has been done on the system and is available as a project result, as well as a FCOM proposal.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SafeNcy project is contributing to the improvement of Flight Management Systems (FMS) functions by proposing an emergency trajectory computation based on real-time aircraft monitoring, especially in case of critical failure detection.

The innovation potential of SafeNcy is quite important and relies mainly in the following domains:
- Within the FMS Domain, by leveraging new functions for the cockpit of the future, bringing operational reliability and increasing flight safety. The Integration within the Cockpit / future FMS demonstration platforms shall be a first step which will pave the way toward industry integration.
- Within the Operational / SWIM Services domain: SafeNcy algorithms requires and will leverage new operational services, as the implementation of an emergency landing site Datastore (DAAS mode) with the most real-time oriented capability of providing pre-established and re-computable landing sites for various usage, the provision of new meteorological services with the right parameters / layers within the different altitudes ranging from cruise level to very low-level ones. SafeNcy will also bring major inputs in terms of concept of operations by addressing the means of interaction with the Airlines Operations Control Centres (OCC), the air traffic centres and the Search and Rescue (SAR) operational units.
- Within pilots training and recurrent operational training: by embedding ENAC, French Air Force Academy / Active pilots and French Air Safety Investigators Bureau, the Advisory Board will bring the full complementarity to design and build new ways to manage abnormal/ emergency situations.

Thus, SafeNcy will lead to improve the mono-pilot innovation trend by reducing workload in ab-normal and critical operations and improving safety in order to reach sufficient safety level enabling the reduced crew operations. SafeNcy will contribute to the main Clean Sky 2 socio-economic target ensuring a sustainable, smart and safe mobility, helping to maintain European industrial leadership.

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