Dassault Aviation (France)

To enhance air transport safety, the main objective of VISION is to validate smarter technologies for aircraft Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) by including 1/ vision-based systems 2/ advanced detection and resilient methods. Critical flight situations are targeted, especially during near-ground operation phases (half of 169 fatal accidents in the last decade during approach or landing). Actually, despite continuous improvements in reliability and performance, the complexity of Flight Control Systems also requires to use many sources likely to suffer from faults and environmental conditions. To overcome these anomalies, recent projects have evaluated advanced solutions, but their transfer to the industry is slowed down by lack of flight validations, limitations of on-board computers or certification issues. The TRL reached by both sides are rather equivalent, with dissimilar pros and cons. Accordingly, VISION aims at capitalizing on the know-how and experience independently acquired to make a significant improvement and maturation of the TRL achieved. To demonstrate the solutions, complementary efforts will be undertaken and two scenarios are considered: i) Flight control recovery, ii) Navigation and guidance recovery during the final approach phase. In i), Fault Detection and Diagnosis and Fault Tolerant Control techniques will be implemented in faulty situations. In ii), vision will be used to estimate and modify the aircraft glide path when local navigation data is denied, or when unexpected obstacles are detected. In both cases, the GN&C systems will be tested on real aircraft platforms and their performance evaluated. VISION will result in flight-validated GN&C solutions with increased TRL, with benefits for the European aircraft industry.

Climate change will shape many aspects of citizen’s lives in the 21st century and beyond. Major ATM changes in the way energy is used or wasted are required to limit global warming and its environmental and social impacts. This VLD1-W2 DREAMS proposal offer mitigation through the development of meaningful and sustainable activities including efficient airport operation and aircraft noise assessment. Arising GNSS technology paves the way for new efficient and optimized approaches and are key enablers to develop sustainable airport operation. During this project, airborne platforms will be developed fitted on airline aircraft and exposed on flight tests and revenue flights. Participating ANSPs will develop new approach procedures and further assess GBAS technology on several airports (Frankfurt, Milano Malpensa) In addition airborne industries will carry out flight testings at Twente. The objective of the VLD1-W2 DREAMS is to bring Enhanced Arrival Procedures (EAP) operations to the next maturity stage (V4) through a Proof of concept combining commercial and non-commercial flights along with flight trials tests. Demonstration will cover business jet, mainline aircraft with Airbus and Boeing aircraft and operators (four airlines or more), three type of operations covered (IGS, SRAP, IGS-to-SRAP) and pioneer flight on GBAS CAT II/III, several months of application, more than hundred flights collected, the use of noise measurements in addition to noise prediction for benefit assessment. A-IGS related work will be limited to technical studies.