Quasi Static Atmospheric Model for Aircraft Trajectory Prediction and Flight Simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces INSA, a quasi-static atmospheric model that adjusts standard atmosphere parameters to improve aircraft trajectory prediction accuracy by better reflecting local atmospheric conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents INSA, a simple yet effective atmospheric model that incorporates temperature and pressure offsets to enhance trajectory predictions over standard models.

Findings

INSA improves the realism of atmospheric property estimations.

The model is easy to implement and adaptable.

Open-source C++ implementation is provided.

Abstract

Aircraft trajectory prediction requires the determination of the atmospheric properties (pressure, temperature, and density) encountered by the aircraft during its flight. This is accomplished by employing a tabulated prediction published by a meteorological service, a static atmosphere model that does not consider the atmosphere variation with time or horizontal position, such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Standard Atmosphere (ISA), or a variation to the later so it better conforms with the expected flight conditions. This article proposes an easy-to-use quasi static model that introduces temperature and pressure variations while respecting all the hypotheses of the ISA model, resulting in more realistic trajectory predictions as the obtained atmospheric properties bear a higher resemblance with the local conditions encountered during the flight. The proposed model relies on two parameters, the temperature and pressure offsets, and converges to the ISA model when both are zero. Expressions to obtain the atmospheric properties are established, and their dependencies with both parameters explained. The author calls this model INSA (ICAO Non Standard Atmosphere) and releases its C++ implementation as open-source software.