Aircraft Emergency Trajectory Design: A Fast Marching Method on a Triangular Mesh

In this paper, an efficient algorithm to generate a short and safe trajectory for an aircraft in a situation of emergency is proposed. The algorithm is to be run on a Flight Management System, hence the computation performance, the size of the stored data and the quality of the solution are taken as primary stakes. The algorithm is based on a front propagation algorithm, the Fast Marching method. Fronts are propagated on a single glide slope, allowing the algorithm to provide a flyable trajectory in a very short time (a few seconds). The algorithm is tested in a mountainous environment, and both shortness and safeness are obtained in response to a critical emergency.