The fatigue damage calculated for an aircraft by the Individual Aircraft Tracking (IAT) programs is dependent on the quality of input data. When the input data quality is poor or invalid, aircraft operators resort to gap-filling techniques to account for missing or invalid data. Invariably, conservative estimates of fatigue damage are obtained by imposing severe penalties for invalid or missing...

Air traffic is growing at a steady rate of to 7% per year in most regions of the world, implying a doubling every 10-25 years. This requires major advances in aircraft noise reduction at airports, just not to increase the noise exposure due to the increased number of aircraft movements. In fact it can be expected, as a consequence of increased opposition to noise by near airport residents, that...

The continuing development of fully autonomous aircraft requires advanced sensing and control systems in order to complete difficult tasks such as aerial refueling and close formation flight. To accomplish such maneuvers, an aircraft must be able to measure the location of nearby aircraft and position itself relative to these other flight vehicles. In visually degraded environments where vision...

Aircraft-assisted pilot suicide is a rare but serious phenomenon. The aim of this study was to evaluate changes in pilot aircraft-assisted suicide risks, i.e., a copycat effect, in the U.S. and Germany after the Germanwings 2015 incident in the French Alps. Aircraft-assisted pilot suicides were searched in the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigation database and ...

The increased complexity of next generation aircraft has popularized Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) as an aircraft design tool. However, MDO efforts consistently neglect aircraft stability and control analyses beyond simple static assessments. Not only does this limit the potential of the MDO to identify an optimal design, but it also fails to assess the MIL-STD or FAR handling qua...

Today’s modern conceptual aircraft designs exhibit a strong, nonlinear, interdisciplinary coupling and require a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. Efficient transfer, sharing, and manipulation of aircraft design and analysis data in such a collaborative environment demands a formal structured representation of data. XML, a W3C recommendation, is one such standard concomitant with a num...

We address a scheduling problem in the context of military aircraft maintenance where the goal is to meet the aircraft requirements for a number of missions in the presence of breakdowns. The assignment of aircraft to a mission must consider the requirements for the mission, the probability of aircraft failure, and capacity of the repair shop that maintains the aircraft. Therefore, a solution b...

This paper presents a framework for provably safe decentralized trajectory planning of multiple (autonomous) aircraft. Each aircraft plans its trajectory individually using a receding horizon strategy based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP). A constrained, inertial, first-order linear model is used to capture the dynamics and kinematics of the vehicle. Safety is guaranteed by maintaini...

Next Generation Air Traac Management will allow for the possibility of free ight, in which each aircraft chooses its own optimal route, altitude and speed. In a free ight environment, the trajectories of several aircraft may be connicting, in which case aircraft may or may not cooperate in resolving the connict. This paper presents a method for noncooperative connict resolution in which each ai...

The automated transfer of flight logbook information from aircrafts into aircraft maintenance systems leads to reduced ground and maintenance time and is thus desirable from an economical point of view. Until recently, flight logbooks have not been managed electronically in aircrafts or at least the data transfer from aircraft to ground maintenance system has been executed manually. Latest airc...