A V2V Approach to Assured Aircraft Emergency Road Landings

This paper introduces an aircraft contingency landing framework that assures the safe execution of road-based emergency landings by coordinating traffic speed regulation through a vehicle-to-vehicle data link. Suitable roads within the reachable footprint are extracted from a geographical database and ranked based on road properties, live weather, and traffic data. A landing trajectory is planned for the road with the highest multi-objective utility, ensuring safe road landing by commanding ground traffic to stop and allocate space on the road using the data link. A use case in Long Island, New York, is presented in simulation with connected ground traffic and gliding fixed-wing aircraft. Results confirm analytically obtained safety constraints and illustrate the safe road landing sequence in dense traffic initially moving at normal speeds.