Airspace-aware Contingency Landing Planning

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, search-based aircraft contingency landing planner that minimizes both airspace and ground risks by integrating dense traffic data, risk quantification, and site selection, demonstrated through a Washington D.C. case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time planning algorithm that accounts for complex airspace risks and ground population exposure, improving safety and efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

Achieves lower joint risk compared to Dubins solutions.

Generates trajectories within 2.9 seconds on a laptop.

Effectively balances airspace disruption and ground safety.

Abstract

This paper develops a real-time, search-based aircraft contingency landing planner that minimizes traffic disruptions while accounting for ground risk. The airspace model captures dense air traffic departure and arrival flows, helicopter corridors, and prohibited zones and is demonstrated with a Washington, D.C., area case study. Historical Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data are processed to estimate air traffic density. A low-latency computational geometry algorithm generates proximity-based heatmaps around high-risk corridors and restricted regions. Airspace risk is quantified as the cumulative exposure time of a landing trajectory within congested regions, while ground risk is assessed from overflown population density to jointly guide trajectory selection. A landing site selection module further mitigates disruption to nominal air traffic operations. Benchmarking against minimum-risk Dubins solutions demonstrates that the proposed planner achieves lower joint risk and reduced airspace disruption while maintaining real-time performance. Under airspace-risk-only conditions, the planner generates trajectories within an average of 2.9 seconds on a laptop computer. Future work will incorporate dynamic air traffic updates to enable spatiotemporal contingency landing planning that minimizes the need for real-time traffic rerouting.