Commercial Aircraft Lateral Flight Reference Trajectory Optimization

Abstract

Cruise is normally the longest and most expensive phase in a long-haul flight. Taking advantage of winds to reduce flight time using a constant mach number is of real interest to the aeronautical industry. Reducing flight time will reduce time related costs, help passengers to catch their connections, and reduce fuel consumption. Saving fuel also leads to fewer polluting emissions released to the atmosphere. The “free-flight” concept is adopted here, with the search space area modeled as a graph in which the weather information at each vertex is obtained from predictions from Environment Canada. The Floyd-Warshall optimization algorithm was implemented to allow the flight reference trajectory optimization to have automatic decision making capacities to deliver the shortest path trajectory between departure and destination airports. Simulations showed that flight time savings as high as 19 minutes could be obtained, representing (roughly estimated) a savings of 1.2 tons of fuel.