Fast Generation of Landing Paths for Fixed-Wing Aircraft with Thrust Failure
Johannes Stephan, Walter Fichter · 2016
In this paper we present a Dubins Path based framework to find emergency landing paths for fixed-wing airplanes in case of total loss of thrust. Using a simple motion model under the assumption of best glide, the aircraft can be treated as a Dubins Vehicle in the horizontal plane. Under these assumptions the optimal landing path can be described with a small set of generalized schemes. The resulting nonlinear systems of equations are solved using a modified Newton’s method, which enables fast solutions with low calculation effort. This enables the proposed algorithms for on-board real-time applications.