Flight Information Research Articles

Research on service quality evaluation and improvement strategy of Chinese civil aviation based on DEA model

Abstract This paper aims to improve the service quality of Chinese civil aviation and objectively evaluate the service quality of Chinese civil aviation through the DEA model. Based on C 2 R model and C 2 GS 2 model, the DEA model is optimized and improved to establish C 2 WH model. Based on the principle of the gray correlation cone of constraints, a gray correlation cone of constraints DEA model is established, and the optimized DEA budget process is constructed. Using the gray correlation constraint cone DEA model to budget and evaluate the service quality data of Chinese civil aviation, combined with the data analysis, the strategy to improve IT intelligence and flight transit service level is proposed. The results show that the items of baggage claim speed, security check waiting time and the Internet have the lowest scores, which are below 4.40. Catering facilities and charges and flight information screen also scored low, below 4.45. The number of passengers checking in for their boarding passes through self-check-in is growing rapidly at a rate of 18%, with this segment exceeding 50% of total passengers. Airport signage optimization resulted in a 45% reduction in airport traffic. This study is beneficial to improve the science of service quality evaluation of civil aviation in China.

INVESTIGATION ON THE USE OF FRICKE DOSIMETRY FOR COSMIC RADIATION

The dosimetry of cosmic radiation outside Earth's atmosphere is a significant challenge due to the high complexity of radiation fields encountered in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and interplanetary space, in addition to the constraints imposed by instrument spaceflight. The Fricke dosimeter is a water-based (96% by mass) chemical dosimetry system that offers the potential to measure the absorbed dose in water in an arbitrary geometry, for doses of up to 400 Gy, for different energy spectra. The LCR/UERJ was part of the Cubes in Space project. The main goal of this work was to obtain absorbed doses in water at different altitudes in the atmosphere using rocket and balloon systems sent by NASA's space station, using the Fricke dosimeter. For each project, 10 polyethylene bags with the Fricke dosimeter were made. The dosimeters were sent on a 20-cubic-meter helium balloon to a target altitude of at least 36.5 km, where they experienced conditions close to space. The average dose in the Fricke solution in the balloon was 9.3 ± 1.5 Gy and in the rocket was 20.4 ± 1.4 Gy. The maximum altitude reached by the balloon is 36.5 km, with a flight duration of approximately 12 hours. On the other hand, the rocket reaches a maximum altitude of 120 km, but it remains in flight for only a few minutes. The 54% difference in the absorbed dose can be explained by the different particles that are responsible for the cosmic radiation in different altitudes. Cosmic radiation increases with altitude in the atmosphere and can vary from hour to hour. The Fricke dosimeter has proven to be effective for aerospace dosimetry, as it was utilized according to the presented boundary conditions. Gathering more technical flight information can lead to future results with greater precision and lower uncertainties.

OPTIMALISASI PEMBERDAYAAN POTENSI SUMBER DAYA NASIONAL DI KALIMANTAN TIMUR GUNA MENGHADAPI ANCAMAN MILITER DI ALKI II

In era of the industrial revolution 4.0 which is marked by a world that is increasingly borderless and full of uncertainty, these challenges are becoming increasingly complex. potential threats in the Indonesian Archipelagic Sea Lanes (ALKI II), particularly in the East Kalimantan region. Developments in the global, regional and national strategic environment have had a significant impact on the conditions and situation at ALKI II. One of the national strategic developments is the establishment of East Kalimantan as the new National Capital (IKN), which makes ALKI II an area vulnerable to military threats. Optimizing the empowerment of the potential of national resources in this region is very important in maintaining stability, sovereignty and state security in the maritime area, especially in ALKI II. To achieve this, steps are needed to be implemented by the central and regional governments to deal with maritime challenges more effectively and ensure the integrity and security of the maritime area. Changes in Indonesia's Center of Gravity (CoG), which was previously based in Jakarta, moved to the East Kalimantan region. In addition, the IKN location is at the ALKI II crossing which is an international waterway passed by military and civilian ships, and is close to the Flight Information Region (FIR) of a neighboring country and within the cruising radius of a neighboring country. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from China on the northern side of Indonesia. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a solid defense architecture in the East Kalimantan IKN and optimize the empowerment of the potential of National Resources in order to deal with military threats and support national defense at sea.

Buffer Times Between Scheduled Events in Resource Assignment Problem: A Conflict-Robust Perspective

Problem definition: In many resource scheduling problems for services with scheduled starting and completion times (e.g., airport gate assignment), a common approach is to maintain appropriate buffer between successive services assigned to a common resource. With a large buffer, the chances of a “crossing” (i.e., a flight arriving later than the succeeding one at the gate) will be significantly reduced. This approach is often preferred over more sophisticated stochastic mixed-integer programming methods that track the arrival of all the flights to infer the number of “conflicts” (i.e., a flight arriving at a time when the assigned gate becomes unavailable). We provide a theoretical explanation, from the perspective of robust optimization for the good performance of the buffering approach in minimizing not only the number of crossings but also the number of conflicts in the operations. Methodology/results: We show that the buffering method inherently minimizes the worst-case number of “conflicts” under both robust and distributionally robust optimization models using down-monotone uncertainty sets. Interestingly, under down-monotone properties, the worst-case number of crossings is identical to the worst-case number of conflicts. Using this equivalence, we demonstrate how feature information from flight and historical delay information can be used to enhance the effectiveness of the buffering method. Managerial implications: The paper provides the first theoretical justification on the use of buffering method to control for the number of conflicts in resource assignment problem. Funding: This work was supported by the 2019 Academic Research Fund Tier 3 of the Ministry of Education-Singapore [Grant MOE-2019-T3-1-010] and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR, China [Grant PolyU 152240/17E]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0572 .

A Descriptive Study ofCasualties Evacuated Out ofAfghanistan by Critical Care Air Transport Teams During the Withdrawal ofU.S. Troops.

The War in Afghanistan ended in August 2021. Evacuation from the country was a large effort during the last days of the conflict. During evacuation efforts at Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport, a suicide bombing occurred necessitating emergent medical care for many injured troops and civilians. The U.S. Air Force Critical Care Air Transport Teams (CCATTs) played a role in the medical care provided during the operations in Afghanistan. We report on in-flight events and interventions that took place during the final days of the Afghanistan withdrawal. We performed a retrospective chart review of patients requiring aeromedical evacuation from the Afghanistan theater of operations by CCATT from July 1 to August 30, 2021. From the CCATT patient care record, data abstractors collected patient characteristics, flight information, vital signs, laboratory values, in-flight interventions, and in-flight events in a study-specific electronic database. We performed descriptive analyses of patient characteristics and in-flight interventions. This study was approved by the San Antonio Institutional Review Board. Nine patients were included in this analysis. Seven out of nine patients were foreign nationals; the remaining two were U.S. Marines. Five patients suffered penetrating injuries from gunshot wounds and four suffered blast injuries. Six received intravenous narcotic analgesia. Four received intravenous sedatives, and four received antibiotics in flight. Two patients required chest tube management. One patient received blood. Three patients were in acute respiratory distress. Severe injuries were sustained during the withdrawal efforts at the end of the War in Afghanistan. Critical Care Air Transport Teams played a role in the care and evacuation of patients out of theater during this unique and unprecedented time. Even given the limitations associated with retrospective studies and a small sample size, information reported in this study can help inform future decisions, and aid in preparatory efforts for future operations, that may require medical care by CCATT.

Assessing Flight Information Priority by Flight Phase for US Army Future Vertical Lift Platforms

Purpose of this study was to identify what information helicopter pilots need and when to present that information based on the phase of the mission. The study included a cross-sectional online survey of all qualified active-duty UH-60 pilots in the Army (289 respondents used in analyses) followed by focus groups. The study questionnaire included demographics items and 31 pieces of information the respondents were asked to rate for three phases of flight. Analysis showed that pilots prefer different information depending on the mission phase, and that commissioned (1LT - MAJ) and warrant officers (WO1 - CW5) prioritize information differently. Also, they prefer to receive information visually with only a few alerts received audibly. In support of the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program, these findings will assist the Holistic Situational Awareness and Decision-Making (HSA-DM) project team to develop systems that reduce the cognitive load pilots experience.

Temporal effects of sugar intake on fly local search and honey bee dance behaviour.

Honey bees communicate flight navigational information of profitable food to nestmates via their dance, a small-scale walking pattern, inside the nest. Hungry flies and honey bee foragers exhibit a sugar-elicited search involving path integration that bears a resemblance to dance behaviour. This study aimed to investigate the temporal dynamics of the initiation of sugar-elicited search and dance behaviour, using a comparative approach. Passive displacement experiments showed that feeding and the initiation of search could be spatially and temporally dissociated. Sugar intake increased the probability of initiating a search but the actual onset of walking triggers the path integration system to guide the search. When prevented from walking after feeding, flies and bees maintained their motivation for a path integration-based search for a duration of 3min. In flies, turning and associated characters were significantly reduced during this period but remained higher than in flies without sugar stimulus. These results suggest that sugar elicits two independent behavioural responses: path integration and increased turning, with the initiation and duration of path integration system being temporally restricted. Honey bee dance experiments demonstrated that the motivation of foragers to initiate dance persisted for 15min, while the number of circuits declined after 3min following sugar ingestion. Based on these findings, we propose that food intake during foraging increases the probability to initiate locomotor behaviours involving the path integration system in both flies and honey bees, and this ancestral connection might have been co-opted and elaborated during the evolution of dance communication by honey bees.

Analisis Kinerja Personel Inspektur Angkutan Udara Otoritas Bandar Udara Wilayah III pada Optimalisasi Pengawasan Standart Pelayanan Minimal PT. Lion Mentari Airlines


 In order to realize aviation safety, security and services, it is necessary to carry out control, supervision and investigation activities by air transport inspectors. Flight services provided by the Air Transport Business Entity for economy-class passenger services, Scheduled Commercial Air Transportation and domestic flight routes. The intended passenger service standards include several things, including pre-flight service standards, in-flight service standards, and post-flight service standards. Pre-flight service standards consist of: flight information, reservation, ticketing, check-in, boarding process, handling of flight delays, flight cancellations and enied boarding passes. Because the number of inspectors in carrying out supervision can also be an influential aspect of the results of the Minimum Standard Inspection of the service. This study aims to determine the factors that get the results of optimizing Air Transport Inspectors on Lion Air airlines. This research is descriptive using qualitative methods with data collection methods in the form of observation, interviews, and documentation. The data obtained is in the form of interviews with the Air Transport Inspector at the Surabaya Region III Airport Authority Office as well as documents used to carry out daily activities. The results of this study show the factors that constrain the control team of the Air Transport Inspector for Lion Air airlines on the Supervision Result Sheet instruments. Namely the unsupervised air transport inspector of airline officers directly at each airline service sub-unit due to a shortage of air transport inspector personnel.
 Keywords: Supervision, Performance, Air Transport Inspector

A Data-Light and Trajectory-Based Machine Learning Approach for the Online Prediction of Flight Time of Arrival

The ability to accurately predict flight time of arrival in real time during a flight is critical to the efficiency and reliability of aviation system operations. This paper proposes a data-light and trajectory-based machine learning approach for the online prediction of estimated time of arrival at terminal airspace boundary (ETA_TAB) and estimated landing time (ELDT), while a flight is airborne. Rather than requiring a large volume of data on aircraft aerodynamics, en-route weather, and traffic, this approach uses only flight trajectory information on latitude, longitude, and speed. The approach consists of four modules: (a) reconstructing the sequence of trajectory points from the raw trajectory that has been flown, and identifying its best-matched historical trajectory which bears the most similarity; (b) predicting the remaining trajectory, based on what has been flown and the best-matched historical trajectory; this is achieved by developing a long short-term memory (LSTM) network trajectory prediction model; (c) predicting the ground speed of the flight along its predicted trajectory, iteratively using the current position and previous speed information; to this end, a gradient boosting machine (GBM) speed prediction model is developed; and (d) predicting ETA_TAB using trajectory and speed prediction from (b) and (c), and using ETA_TAB to further predict ELDT. Since LSTM and GBM models can be trained offline, online computation efforts are kept at a minimum. We apply this approach to real-world flights in the US. Based on our findings, the proposed approach yields better prediction performance than multiple alternative methods. The proposed approach is easy to implement, fast to perform, and effective in prediction, thus presenting an appeal to potential users, especially those interested in flight ETA prediction in real time but having limited data access.

What are the Crucial Factors in Gaining Customer Recommendations in the Airline Industry?

The airline business is continually growing. This study tries to find out important factors for customers to give their recommendations for an airline. Text mining approach and feature selection methods are applied to clean the data set and to select the most crucial factors of customer recommendations. This study collected 846 online customer reviews for full-service airlines and 179 low-cost carrier airlines. Cleanliness and crew care are the most critical factors for full-service airline customers. Low-cost carrier airline customers were more concerned about the value of money and flight information. The results provide airlines’ managers with new insights to make their customers willing to give recommendations and gain a positive brand image.
 Keywords: Online customers review, text mining, customer recommendations, feature selection, airline

The progressive use of visual cues in skilled adolescent cricket batters

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the visual anticipation of skilled adolescent cricket batters during a temporal occlusion task. Thirty skilled adolescent cricket batters were recruited for the study. A temporal occlusion paradigm was employed to allow participants to predict the swing and length of the delivery. A projected video was occluded at seven points during the delivery, with each subsequent point providing progressively more visual information. Skilled adolescent batters were not able to correctly anticipate the delivery without ball flight information. They required between 100 and 200 ms of ball flight to correctly perceive the delivery type above the level of chance. These findings have implications for the development of visual anticipation skills for children in striking sports.

Spatiotemporal Image-Based Flight Trajectory Clustering Model with Deep Convolutional Autoencoder Network

Recent studies in four-dimensional flight trajectories attempted to identify the impacts of various flight trajectories and maneuver parameters on air traffic management efficiency and aviation safety. The previous studies attempted to cluster trajectories based on spatial scales. However, these might require converting the flight trajectories to equal lengths for sequence-based clustering. This paper proposes a novel trajectory three-channel image representation and Gaussian mixture model clustering based on several image-processing methodologies. The aircraft’s latitude, longitude, flight level, and ground speed are represented as corresponding pixel information of the image followed by image-based flight trajectory representation and clustering methods (including deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE), principal component analysis (PCA) image dimensionality reduction, and image feature points extraction) using a half-year of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast flight trajectory data in the Hong Kong flight information region. The computational results indicate that the image-based trajectory representation produces more insights for trajectory processing, such as the application of convolutional neural networks and image-processing algorithms. In addition, the DCAE model has better performance and robustness for trajectory feature extraction and similarity analysis than PCA, which will provide ideas for multiparameter trajectory similarity analysis and prediction.

Attention Load Regulates the Facilitation of Audio-Visual Information on Landing Perception in Badminton.

Based on the role of the high temporal sensitivity of the auditory modality and the advantage of audio-visual integration in motion perception and anticipation, we investigated the effect of audio-visual information on landing perception in badminton through two experiments; and we explored the regulatory role of attention load. In this study, experienced badminton players were asked to predict the landing position of the shuttle under the conditions of video (visual) or audio-video (audio-visual) presentation. We manipulated flight information or attention load. The results of Experiment 1 showed that, whether the visual information was rich or not, that is, whether or not it contained the early flight trajectory, the addition of auditory information played a promoting role. The results of Experiment 2 showed that attention load regulated the facilitation of multi-modal integration on landing perception. The facilitation of audio-visual information was impaired under high load, meaning that audio-visual integration tended to be guided by attention from top to bottom. The results support the superiority effect of multi-modal integration, suggesting that adding auditory perception training to sports training could significantly improve athletes' performance.

Analisis Informasi Status Keberangkatan Penerbangan Oleh Unit Customer Service PT. Angkasa Pura II Bandar Udara Internasional Husein Sastranegara Bandung

Process of providing information unit Customer Service Husein Sastranegara International Airport experienced a discrepancy in flight status information between FIDS and AAS at the departure untill passengers were confused because they received different information from each of the information facilities. Purpose this study is determine process of services provided, constraints, and efforts in the process of information services provided. This research was conducted using a qualitative analysis, which tried to describe all conditions that existed, condition of symptoms according to what they were at the time research was conducted. Based on the main problem, namely to analyze the constraints and what efforts are made by information unit Customer Service when there is a difference in scheduled departure flight information. Result of the study show that the flow of service information on status of departure exists in the unit Customer Service Husein Sastranegara International Airport refers to Standard Operating Procedure of PT. Angkasa Pura II 2022 with the aim of providing fast, precise and accurate information services. Constraints on differences in information caused by miscommunication with other unit and less information service staff. Listening detail every Announcement, contacting related units, teamwork and additional personnel are efforts to overcome the obstacles encountered.

Evidence-based managerial decision-making with machine learning: The case of Bayesian inference in aviation incidents

Understanding the factors behind aviation incidents is essential, not only because of the lethality of the accidents but also the incidents' direct and indirect economic impact. Even minor incidents trigger significant economic damage and create disruptions to aviation operations. It is crucial to investigate these incidents to understand the underlying reasons and hence, reduce the risk associated with physical and financial safety in a precarious industry like aviation. The findings may provide decision-makers with a causally accurate means of investigating the topic while untangling the difficulties concerning the statistical associations and causal effects. This research aims to identify the significant variables and their probabilistic dependencies/relationships determining the degree of aircraft damage. The value and the contribution of this study include (1) developing a fully automatic ML prediction-based DSS for aircraft damage severity, (2) conducting a deep network analysis of affinity between predicting variables using probabilistic graphical modeling (PGM), and (3) implementing a user-friendly dashboard to interpret the business insight coming from the design and development of the Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). By leveraging a large, real-world dataset, the proposed methodology captures the probability-based interrelations among air terminal, flight, flight crew, and air-vehicle-related characteristics as explanatory variables, thereby revealing the underlying, complex interactions in accident severity. This research contributes significantly to the current body of knowledge by defining and proving a methodology for automatically categorizing aircraft damage severity based on flight, aircraft, and PIC (pilot in command) information. Moreover, the study combines the findings of the Bayesian Belief Networks with decades of aviation expertise of the subject matter expert, drawing and explaining the association map to find the root causes of the problems and accident relayed variables.

Interface Design and Implementation of Airport General Flight Information Display System

This paper aims to explore the interface design and implementation of the airport general flight information display system. Through the analysis of the requirements and functional design of the system, this paper proposes a user experience-based interface design scheme, and implements the scheme through front-end technology. The experimental results show that the interface design scheme proposed in this paper can effectively improve users' experience and operation efficiency.

Development and Evaluation of an Enhanced Virtual Reality Flight Simulation Tool for Airships

A real-time flight simulation tool is proposed using a virtual reality head-mounted display (VR-HMD) for remotely piloted airships operating in beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) conditions. In particular, the VR-HMD was developed for stratospheric airships flying at low/high altitudes. The proposed flight simulation tool uses the corresponding aerodynamics characteristics of the airship, the buoyancy effect, mass balance, added mass, propulsion contributions and ground reactions in the FlightGear Flight Simulator (FGFS). The VR headset was connected to the FGFS along with the radio controller containing the real-time orientation/state of each button, which is also simulated to provide better situational awareness, and a head-up display (HUD) that was developed to provide the required flight data. In this work, a system was developed to connect the FGFS and the VR-capable graphics engine Unity to a PC and a wireless VR-HMD in real time with minimal lag between data transmission. A balance was found for FGFS to write to a CSV file at a period of 0.01 s. For Unity, the file was read every frame, which translates to around 0.0167 s (60 Hz). A test procedure was also conducted with a similar rating technique based on the NASA TLX questionnaire, which identifies the pilot’s available mental capacity when completing an assigned task to assure the comfortability of the proposed VR-HMD. Accordingly, a comparison was made for the aircraft control using the desktop simulator and the VR-HMD tool. The results showed that the current iteration of the system is ideal to train pilots on using similar systems in a safe and immersive environment. Furthermore, such an advanced portable system may even increase the situational awareness of pilots and allow them to complete a sizeable portion of actual flight tests with the same data transmission procedures in simulation. The VR-HMD flight simulator was also conceived to express the ground control station (GCS) concept and transmit flight information as well as the point of view (POV) visuals in real-time using the real environment broadcast using an onboard camera.

Flight Reservation System

Flight Reservation System

Two-Loop Acceleration Autopilot Design and Analysis Based on TD3 Strategy

A two-loop acceleration autopilot is designed using the twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) strategy to avoid the tedious design process of conventional tactical missile acceleration autopilots and the difficulty of meeting the performance requirements of the full flight envelope. First, a deep reinforcement learning model for the two-loop autopilot is developed. The flight state information serves as the state, the to-be-designed autopilot control parameters serve as the action, and a reward mechanism based on the stability margin index is designed. The TD3 strategy is subsequently used to offline learn the control parameters for the entire flight envelope. An autopilot control parameter fitting model that can be directly applied to the guidance loop is obtained. Finally, the obtained fitting model is combined with the impact angle constraint in the guidance system and verified online. The simulation results demonstrate that the autopilot based on the TD3 strategy can self-adjust the control parameters online based on the real-time flight state, ensuring system stability and achieving accurate acceleration command tracking.

Forward-propagation-free focusing MUSIC algorithm for Lamb waves

The multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is originally used for direction of arrival estimation and frequency identification. MUSIC-like algorithms have gained their popularity in structural health monitoring (SHM) owing to their super-resolution characteristic and the virtue of baseline independence. MUSIC essentially is a searching algorithm to find the best phase difference matching between the eigenvector from signal subspace and the presupposed steering vector. However, in the guided-wave-based SHM (in plate-like structure, the guided wave is Lamb wave), the dispersion effect will definitely lead to phase distortion. Therefore, Xu et al. presented a focusing MUSIC algorithm where the time reversal technique is adopted to eliminate the dispersion in the way of back propagation. Seeing that the phase difference information, which is necessary for MUSIC, disappears after back propagation, the damage scattered wave packet, obtained by window truncation, is forward propagated again at the constant group velocity to recover the time of flight information. Nevertheless, the forward propagation process is superfluous from the view of phase matching. In the presented forward-propagation-free focusing MUSIC (FPF-F MUSIC) algorithm (the simplified version of Xu’s work), by revising the steering vector in the form of phase coincidence, the matching relation for MUSIC is modified from phase difference matching to phase alignment matching, so that the forward propagation and the steering vector traversal setting for every inspection point are all omitted. The damage localization performance of FPF-F MUSIC is verified on the aluminum plate with double through-hole and surface defects under uniform linear and circular arrays.