Flight path management of an aircraft in emergency situation

A distress event i.e. loss of engine power, structural damage etc., creates a major emergency situation in General Aviation (GA) aircraft. It requires location of a safe-to-land runway within reach, and immediately planning and executing an effective flight path towards it. Currently, technological development in avionics allows creating a flight deck decision support tool for trajectory planning of GA aircraft in emergency situation. Principal part of the system constitutes flight path optimization module. The automated path-planning algorithm generates within seconds an optimized trajectory to be followed by the pilot to safe landing. The trajectory planning is formulated as an optimal control problem, with the aircraft kinematics and dynamics expressed by the state equations, and objective functional that may capture the time, length, energy loss, etc. Obstacles and restricted or prohibited zones are represented as constraints on the positional state variables. The purpose of the paper is to present the method of flight path optimization of an aircraft in emergency, after a distress event, which makes impossible continuation of the original flight. The methods allow determining optimal escape flight path from special protection areas (e.g. cities etc.) or danger zones, as well. The simplified realization of the Ritz-Galerkin method was used in this work, which uses an approximate solution to boundary value problems for determining the optimal flight trajectory. The method allows determining the optimal trajectory of the flight satisfying the initial/final conditions and control functions and path constrains for an aircraft.