Flight-Deck Strategies and Outcomes When Flying Schedule-Matching Descents

Abstract

Recent studies at NASA Ames Research Center have investigated the development and use of ground-based (air traffic controller) tools to manage and schedule air traffic in future terminal airspace. An exploratory study was undertaken to investigate the impacts that such tools (and concepts) could have on the flight-deck. Ten Boeing 747-400 crews flew eight optimized profile descents in the Los Angeles terminal airspace, while receiving scripted current day and futuristic speed clearances, to ascertain their ability to fly schedulematching descents without prior training. Although the study was exploratory in nature, four variables were manipulated: route constraints, winds, speed changes, and clearance phraseology. Despite flying the same scenarios with the same events and timing, there were significant differences in the time it took crews to fly the approaches. This variation is the product of a number of factors but highlights potential difficulties for scheduling tools that would have to accommodate this amount of natural variation in descent times. The focus of this paper is the examination of the crews' aircraft management strategies and outcomes. This includes potentially problematic human-automation interaction issues that may negatively impact arrival times, speed and altitude constraint compliance, and energy management efficiency.

Implementation of a Trajectory Prediction Function for Trajectory Based Operations

“…6 This results in a "SPEEDBRAKES EXTENDED" EngineIndicating and Crew-Alerting System (EICAS) message. This message was triggered 56 times during the flights without prediction and 70 times during the flights with prediction.…”

“…5 They can also contribute to safety concerns such as increased occurrences of altitude constraint violations, airspeed excursions, high-energy approaches and go-arounds. 6 The tactical flight management concept was developed to increase the resiliency and robustness of TBO through a paradigm shift that improves FMS compatibility with tactical operations. 7 The approach is to develop Tactical FMS (T-FMS) technologies that combine trajectory planning and guidance functions together to generate a 4D guidance trajectory, which would be continually updated to achieve tactical objectives.…”

Enabling Performance-Based Navigation Arrivals: Development and Simulation Testing of the Terminal Sequencing and Spacing System

“…Two pilot-in-the-loop simulations were conducted in NASA's Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator and B747-400 fullmission flight simulators. These simulations used active commercial pilots to identify potential energy-management issues related to the speed profiles suggested by TSS [35] [36].…”

Waypoint Position Optimization for Accurate Ground-Based Arrival Time Control of Aircraft

“…Despite the fact that the position of the waypoints used to measure the time to arrive and determine the flight speed to satisfy the required time are also expected to affect the arrival time accuracy, conventional waypoints have been applied in the aforementioned past studies. Although the application of multiple waypoints has been introduced to improve the arrival time accuracy [14], only conventional waypoints have been used. Even in a recent study on the application of the ground-based speed advisory [25], the waypoints were evenly spaced.…”