Emergency Landing Field Recognition Based on Elevation Data Using Parallel Processing

In case of a forced emergency landing situation it is crucial to identify suitable landing fields rapidly and precisely. To safely land an aircraft, various options are possible. A premium choice would be a published airfield. But there are situations where such a location is unreachable - e. g. in regions with few widely scattered airfields or if the airplane's altitude is too low to reach a nearby airfield. In these cases, other flat terrains may be suitable to safely land the plane. If a satisfactory landing field is known, an Emergency Landing Assistant can be used to calculate an optimized route from the current position [3]. In this paper we present a parallel processing approach based on POSIX threads to identify suitable emergency landing fields. As input of the algorithm elevation data of a surface model is used. The landing fields are charaterized by a set of algorithm parameters which are based on different types of slope among the data points within a certain landing field. The recognized landing fields are scored according to their bumpiness measured by the variance of the altitude values and stored in a geo database for later usage in an emergency case.