What is it about?
Lack of proper energy management during descent can lead to excessive deviations from the intended flight plan. This paper presents a method of automating the recovery taking into account both the desired energy level and the time-of-arrival constraints.
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Why is it important?
The task of identifying a recovery trajectory is very challenging for pilots, especially when time-of-arrival is taken into consideration. The automation presented in the paper can simplify this task, allowing the crew to focus on monitoring the progress of the automated recovery process.
Perspectives
This article uses the paradigm that when basic automation fails the aircraft has to be equipped with additional automation to ensure the workload is kept to a bearable level. Of course, when all the available automation fails the pilots will eventually end up on their own and will have to manually fly the aircraft. Hopefully there will always be some level of automation to provide a safety net such that pilots can have a fallback solution before attempting a manual recovery.
Brian Zammit
University of Malta
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On-Board Energy Recovery Assistance for Time-Constrained Descents, Journal of Aircraft, May 2018, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/1.c034281.
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