UAS safety planning and contingency assessment and advisory reseach

Abstract

Operation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) require the same degree of pre-flight and mission planning as that preformed for manned aircraft. The goal of routine operations has an evolving safety case which must include the review of actions and conditions of the aircraft and the pilot during normal, off-nominal, abnormal and emergency events. UAS flight planning is currently a manually intensive process, and trying to replicate a pilot's decision making course of actions for mission contingencies is an exceptionally tedious and lengthy activity. Additionally, the incorporation of contingency/emergency routes is left up to the planner and there is no guarantee of sufficiency or consistency of contingency plans when activated. To support the recurring assessment of these actions, Mosaic ATM has performed a 2 year NASA project to development a mission safety assessment and contingency support tool called Aviate. Our project objective is to automate the UA contingency flight planning process providing uniform accounting to known conditions, hazards, and other factors. We will field, increasingly, a capable product suite that supports the mission planner, the air traffic controller, the PIC, and the onboard intelligent piloting function. This will provide a level of confidence and an equivalent level of safety to unmanned aircraft mission planning prior to any UAS departures from airfields in the NAS or flights into through the NAS.