Alejandro Murrieta Mendoza, Simon Demange, Francois George, and Ruxandra Mihaela Botez
Flight Management System, Trajectory Optimization, Aircraft Flight Simulator, Modeling
Aircraft flight trajectory optimization is a promising option for improving fuel burn and reducing airline costs. Airborne devices such as Flight Management Systems are used to estimate costs and to define the most economical trajectories for aircraft flights. Different aircraft models are used to calculate fuel burn and flight-related costs. Most consist of a set of differential equations called Equations of Motion. The Flight Management System normally uses a set of lookup tables called a Performance Database. These tables contain experimental data from aircraft, including fuel burn and horizontal distance traveled, that are required to estimate trajectories costs. In this paper, a Level D flight simulator was used to sample fuel flow data and to create a Performance Database for the cruise phase of the Citation X, that was further implemented in a new algorithm calculates the cruise flight cost. To validate this Performance Database, the cost of a set of flights using this algorithm was calculated, and compared with the same flights flown with the flight simulator. Results showed that the obtained Performance Database was accurate and could be further used to estimate cruise costs and develop trajectory optimization algorithms.
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