Recent advances in navigation and data communication technologies make it feasible for individual aircraft to plan and fly their trajectories in the presence of other aircraft in the airspace. This way, individual aircraft can take advantage of the atmospheric and traffic conditions to optimally plan their paths. This capability is termed as the free flight concept. While the free flight concep...

Air Traac Management Systems (ATMS) of the future allow for the possibility of Free Flight, in which aircraft choose their own optimal routes, altitude and speed. In a free ight environment, the trajectories of diierent aircraft may be connicting, in which case aircraft may or may not cooperate in resolving the connict. In this paper, noncooperative connict resolution methods based on game theo...

At airports with closely-spaced parallel runways, the inability to conduct simultaneous approaches in all weather conditions is a cause of significant delay. One concept for reducing delay is paired approaches, where two airc raft on closely spaced approaches are ‘paired’, and the ‘trail’ aircraft stays within a safe zone relative to the ‘lead’. This positioning guarantees that neither aircraft...

Planetary exploration may be enhanced by the use of aircraft for mobility. This paper reviews the development of aircraft for planetary exploration missions at NASA and reviews the power and propulsion options for planetary aircraft. Several advanced concepts for aircraft exploration, including the use of in situ resources, the possibility of a flexible all-solid-state aircraft, the use of ento...

Due to the large increase in the density of aircraft arrivals at airports in recent years, it has become important to optimize the scheduling of aircraft landings in order to reduce wait time, improve airport efficiency, and minimize fuel consumption while maintaining safety. As the density of aircraft arrivals increases, however, so too does the complexity of trajectory planning and generation...

BACKGROUND Specimens from aviation accident pilot fatalities are submitted to the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI) for toxicological analyses. Trends of fatal amateur-built aircraft accidents and toxicological findings in the associated pilot fatalities have not been examined. METHODS Fatal amateur-built aircraft accidents that occurred during 1990-2009 were evaluated by retrieving in...

Visual detection of aircraft by human observers is an important element of aviation safety. To assess and ensure safety, it would be useful to be able to be able to predict the visibility, to a human observer, of an aircraft of specified size, shape, distance, and coloration. Examples include assuring safe separation among aircraft and between aircraft and unmanned vehicles, design of airport c...

Most passengers, airlines, and the aircraft industry in general are used to very high safety standards and precautions surrounding aircraft systems. As the computerization of aircraft steadily progresses, the question of security, i.e. the protection against intentional manipulations, becomes increasingly relevant. This article focuses on these security challenges. In particular, it adds the fo...

The fractional aircraft market is the fastest growing segment of the business aircraft industry. A fractional aircraft operation is complex—essentially an unscheduled airline in a constantly changing environment. Bombardier Flexjet implemented a comprehensive three-module optimization system to simultaneously maximize its use of aircraft, crews, and facilities. AD OPT Technologies designed the ...

The integration of unmanned aircraft into the national airspace system requires new methods of ensuring collision avoidance. For unmanned aircraft a capability to ‘detect-and-avoid’ is required to replace the traditional ‘see-andavoid’ performed by pilots. The initial results from testing a Mobile Aircraft Tracking System (MATS) show that this ground-based radar system can track a ScanEagle unm...