Safe Automatic Flight Back and Landing of Aircraft Flight Reconfiguration Function (FRF)

SOFIA (safe automatic flight back and landing of aircraft) project is a response to the challenge of developing concepts and techniques enabling the safe and automatic return to ground in the event of hostile actions. Activities in this sense have been started in the framework of the SAFEE SP3 (secure aircraft in the future european environment sub-project 3) project. SOFIA project is proposed as the continuation of the SAFEE works on FRF (flight reconfiguration function), the system to automatically return the aircraft to ground. SOFIA will design architectures for integrating the FRF system into several typologies of avionics for civil transport aircraft; development of one of this architectures; validation, following E-OCVM (european operational concept validation methodology) of the FRF concept and the means to integrate it in the current ATM (air traffic management); safety assessment of FRF at aircraft and operational (ATC-air traffic control) levels. The SOFIA product is the FRF system that will take the control of the aircraft and will manage to safely return it to ground under a security emergency (e.g. hijacking), disabling the control and command of the aircraft from the cockpit. This means to create and execute a new flight plan towards a secure airport and landing the aircraft at it. The flight plan can be generated in ground (ATC), or in a military airplane and transmitted to the aircraft, or created autonomously at the FRF.