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.
