Development of a database for strategic route planning considering noise protection areas and meteorological conditions

As air traffic remains despite the economic recession in summer 2008 a growth market and current forecasts still predict an increase in the air traffic worldwide, it becomes necessary to change current traffic procedures and to integrate innovative ATM technologies in order to meet future requirements. The air transportation system is a highly complex system with innumerable influencing factors. One of the main goals is to preserve or even improve the current safety level, however environmental and economic aspects become more and more important. This paper describes a concept for a dynamic flight path optimization by means of spatial and timely changing variables focusing on ecological efficiency. Regarding the influence factors, there are several weather phenomenon as well as noise protection areas to consider. Particularly, the gathering of meteorological information is challenging as a single aircraft is only able to accomplish local measurements. Nowadays, the flight crew is provided with weather forecasts for the planned route and its surroundings before the flight. Within this research concept it is assumed that in the near future regular updates are transmitted via data link to the aircraft. As a large amount of data has to be processed then, efficient data storage, sorting, and weighting is necessary to ensure a clear data handling for the generation of the four-dimensional trajectories. For this purpose an onboard database is considered. Through an early optimization of the flight path, an ecological efficient route planning can be achieved which allows a minimization of detours and a reduction of noise pollution at the same time.