Minimizing the Noise of an Aircraft During Landing Approach

Abstract

In the past, aircraft performance optimization studies have been mainly associated with time or energy criteria, i. e. minimizing the time of climb, maximizing range, minimizing fuel consumption and so on. There have been fewer attempts to restrict or minimize the aircraft noise during takeoff and/or landing. This noise can be reduced not only by improving the noise characteristics of the engines and the aircraft, but also by developing suitable guidance and control systems. In this paper the choice of reasonable optimality criteria will be discussed in order to minimize the amount of noise inconvenience encountered by people living in the community surrounding the airport. The resulting optimal control problems will be solved for a special aircraft model by the indirect approach using the maximum principle. Several state as well as control constraints will be taken into account. The numerical algorithms used for the computation of the noise minimal trajectories will be presented and some results will be shown.