Identifying Phases of Flight in General Aviation Operations

Abstract

Identifying phases of flight in General Aviation can help in identifying safety events, which are events which may result in the aircraft being in a hazardous state. Unlike commercial operations that have well-defined phases of flight such as taxi, takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, approach, and landing, GA missions have more hard-to-identify phases of flight. For example, pilot training missions can involve multiple “touch-and-go” maneuvers, which makes it difficult to define a distinct cruise phase during the patterns. Here, we present initial work on automatically identifying phases of flight in GA. We demonstrate our approach on 16 different flight samples from a Cirrus SR20 aircraft equipped with a Garmin G1000 avionics system.