Engine-out Emergency Landing Assistant (ELA)

The proposed ELA approach supports pilots in the emergency situation described above, to find an appropriate gliding path in a minimum amount of time that guides him to a secure runway. ELA calculates four different gliding paths for each runway in vicinity while taking the wind into account. A simplified aircraft model is used to minimize the the computational cost. Thus, reachable runways and the corresponding gliding path can be easily determined so that the aircraft arrives at the runway threshold in an appropriate altitude. ELA choses the approach that offers the maximum robustness regarding to unpredictable incidents and the best landing conditions for the respective aircraft. For that reason, a quality function has been defined that facilitates real-time calculations by ELA. An automatic selection of the “best” approach is performed. Besides a on time computation (offline ELA) a permanent adaption of the gliding path can take place (online ELA). Contrary to the previous techniques based o trochoids that only take a constant wind component into account, the procedure developed in the FernUniversität Hagen is capable to model arbitrary complex wind configurations. Under the influence of complex wind configurations an optimized gliding path can be calculated in real-time.

The “best” computed gliding path must be free of obstacles. Therefore, a digital surface model can be used which is based on LiDAR elevation measurements. The surface (including man-made buildings and vegetation) is modeled by point clouds of elevation data. The individual elevation measurements are usually not aligned as equidistant grid points. ELA must check, if the gliding path comes to close or intersects the earth’s surface. In this case, the investigated gliding path cannot be used without an adaption. An adjustment of the gliding path is only possible, if enough excess altitude and sufficient computational power for the path optimization is available. It should be mentioned that the computational cost increases with the number of possible obstacles points. Hence, we initially only consider the case with one single obstacle. If a demanding adoption should be prevented, an obstacle free gliding path with lower quality could be selected. Of course it is not guaranteed that in general such a gliding path exists.

Emergency Landing Assistant (2019 Demo)

Video description (Video 1)

Emergency landing in blind flight. In this video you can see an emergency landing approach at instrument flying conditions (IMC). Due to the high speed of the glide path calculation by the moving target method, it is possible to perform an emergency landing even with complete loss of visibility. This is demonstrated here at the flight simulator for an emergency landing on the airfield Santa Cilia De Jaca.


Contribution to the FernUni Magazine

Video description (Video 2)

Contribution to the FernUni Magazine. Here, Prof. Schiffmann explains the idea of the emergency landing assistant, why a database with emergency landing fields (ELFs) is useful and how these ELFs can be determined automatically. The explanation is in German.


Real emergency landing exercise with a Katana DV20.

Video description (Video 3)

Real emergency landing exercise with a Katana DV20. This video shows a simulated emergency landing at Arnsberg-Menden Airport (EDLA or FAM). Prof. Schiffmann approached the airfield inbound to southeast and set the engine to idle at about 2300 ft above the center of the runway. Then he flew at the speed of best gliding (65-70 kn) along the route prescribed by ELA and reached the runway threshold at the right height for landing. The ELA glide path was calculated for the current wind situation (from 190 to 7kn) and is displayed in the navigation software AirNavigationPro.

Webmaster | 12.08.2021