Gradient Guided Search for Aircraft Contingency Landing Planning

Abstract

This paper presents a three-dimensional discrete search path planner for fixed-wing aircraft emergency landing planning that manages state-space complexity by incorporating cost gradients to assure descent flight path angle and runway heading alignment constraints are met. Our approach incorporates steady wind and maximizes margin from flight envelope boundaries to accommodate wind variation in a manner commensurate with a loss of thrust condition. A novel multi-objective cost function that combines gradient-based path guidance and population risk metrics is implemented to efficiently enable discrete search to find a robust solution. The proposed method is demonstrated through use cases with population data for a region of Long Island, New York that highlight our algorithm's effectiveness.