An Analytic Trajectory Planner for Aircraft with Severe Damage or Failures

This paper describes an analytic real-time emergency landing trajectory planner applicable in situations where an aircraft experiences severe damage or failure(s) that contract the feasible lateral plane flight envelope. Solutions are constructed as sequences of spirals that follow a reference arc, extending a traditional Dubins path solver to handle cases in which an aircraft cannot fly straight. A comprehensive Turning Dubins Vehicle (TDV) solver is presented to handle the spectrum of relative distances and headings between aircraft initial state and the landing runway approach end. This solver is shown to generate minimum-distance landing paths. Example solutions are presented with future work aimed at assessing the impact of transitions and disturbances as well as application to specific damage/failure scenarios.