Design of a flight management system to support four-dimensional trajectories

Abstract

This paper presents the design and simulation of the functions of a flight Management System (FMS) in order to follow four-dimensional trajectories automatically. This is achieved by controlling the aircraft’s airspeed, altitude, heading and vertical speed in order to arrive to the merging point in a specified time. The system receives data from the aircraft and computes new control parameters based on mathematical equations and algorithms of prediction trajectories. Additional features have been added to the FMS-4D, such as the capability of predicting the arrival time taking into account previous flight parameters and speed/altitude constrains. Finally, a testing phase was carried out using a flight simulator in order to obtain the performance and results of the designed system.