Correction of restored aircraft flight trajectories based on the instrumental landing system indications

Аuthors

Strelkov V. V.^*, Shkredov V. S.

Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after N.E. Zhukovsky (TsAGI), Zhukovsky, Moscow region, Russia

*e-mail: v_strelkov@tsagi.ru

Abstract

Post-flight analysis of passenger aircraft flight paths performed during operation provides important information for understanding the causes of accidents and developing measures to prevent them. Restoring the aircraft actual flight path with sufficient accuracy from the registered flight data remains an actual task. The correctness of the trajectory recovery is of particular importance when the task is to investigate large number of flights, that is sufficient to identify objective precursors for a flight accident on landing. The problem is that the recorded flight data does not allow “as it is” to directly plot a smooth trajectory of the aircraft in the coordinate system associated with the runway, due to the existing measurement errors of geodetic coordinates, as well as the discreteness of registering parameters in time and signal value on some types of aircraft. There are some technologies for restoring the airplane's trajectory in the horizontal plane on landing by integrating the components of the ground speed vector and setting the parameters of the computational algorithm by comparing the calculated trajectory with the recorded GPS coordinates of the aircraft. However, the processing of flight data records shows that in a number of airports the registered coordinates of landing trajectories (respectively, the reconstructed trajectories) can be shifted relative to the runway axis.
The paper proposes a method for correcting the reconstructed trajectory of the aircraft at landing based on the registered deviations of the aircraft from the equal-signal zone of the heading beacon and analyzes the results of such correction. It is shown, that individual correction of each landing trajectory has a significant effect on the distribution of the lateral deviation of the considered sample of aircraft trajectories from the runway axis above the threshold, as well as the lateral coordinates of the aircraft touchdown points on the runway. More than 3000 real passenger airplane landings at one of the airports of the Russian Federation were used in the paper.

Keywords:

landing approach, coordinates of the aircraft, flight path, GPS, instrumental landing system, recorded flight data, trajectory correction

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