Design and preliminary pilot assessment of a directive runway conflict alerting and resolution system

Abstract

The work described in this paper was carried out collaboratively between the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering of the University of Malta and Cranfield University’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Department of Systems Engineering and Human Factors as part of the FLYSAFE project, funded under EC Framework Programme 6 (AIP4-CT-2005-516167).As runway incursions continue to occur, a radical change is required in the technique used for runway conflict mitigation. This paper presents the concept of an airborne runway conflict alerting and resolution system that generates directive alerts to the crew in order to instruct them on the action that should be taken to resolve the conflict. The system proposed utilises aircraft performance calculations to evaluate the viability of potential escape manoeuvres that could avert a collision as the basis of directing the crew into taking the safest action. A preliminary pilot assessment of the directive alerting philosophy has been carried out to qualitatively assess crew acceptance of this novel alerting philosophy in runway conflict mitigation.peer-reviewe