UAS safety planning and contingency assessment and advisory reseach

Abstract

Operation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) require the same degree of pre-flight and mission planning as that preformed for manned aircraft. The goal of routine operations has an evolving safety case which must include the review of actions and conditions of the aircraft and the pilot during normal, off-nominal, abnormal and emergency events. UAS flight planning is currently a manually intensive process, and trying to replicate a pilot's decision making course of actions for mission contingencies is an exceptionally tedious and lengthy activity. Additionally, the incorporation of contingency/emergency routes is left up to the planner and there is no guarantee of sufficiency or consistency of contingency plans when activated.To support the recurring assessment of these actions, Mosaic ATM has performed a 2 year NASA project to development a mission safety assessment and contingency support tool called Aviate. Our project objective is to automate the UA contingency flight planning process providing uniform accounting to known conditions, hazards, and other factors. We will field, increasingly, a capable product suite that supports the mission planner, the air traffic controller, the PIC, and the onboard intelligent piloting function. This will provide a level of confidence and an equivalent level of safety to unmanned aircraft mission planning prior to any UAS departures from airfields in the NAS or flights into through the NAS.

Prognostics for Autonomous Electric-Propulsion Aircraft

“…Due to restricted on-board computing capabilities, contingency management for autonomous and electric aircraft have been restricted to fail-safe operations, like loitering, immediate landing or return to home plate. Approaches to more complex contingency planning for UASs have been developed for the planning and pre-flight assessment (DiFelici & Wargo, 2016) or concern a "holistic" multi-level contingency management system that spans UAS, communications, weather, and battle teams (Franke, Hughes, & Jameson, 2006). The actual planning uses the Lockheed Martin tool TeamWorks (Franke et al, 2006) and only has limited control or monitoring capabilities on-board.…”