Intelligent hazard avoidance system

Weather hazards cause about 70% of flight delays and 21% of accidents in National Airspace System. Modern airborne weather radars enable pilots to detect and assess the severity of surrounding weather hazards in real-time. Military aircraft equipped with tactical data links can receive information about pop-up tactical threats, such as Surface-To-Air Missiles, that can put the safety of the aircraft in jeopardy. Currently, pilots need to mentally combine hazard information received from various sources to determine whether these hazards will endanger the safety of the aircraft and warrant an avoidance maneuver. If an avoidance maneuver is required, pilots also need to decide what necessary maneuvers should be performed to avoid these potential hazards as well as terrain and surrounding traffic. Finally, the proposed avoidance maneuver in the form of a modified flight plan may need the approval of air traffic controllers before it can be executed. Upon approval, the modified flight plan may be manually loaded into Flight Management System to become the active flight plan. Since the current approach for hazard assessment and avoidance imposes a heavy burden on pilot workload, this paper presents an Intelligent Hazard Avoidance System that automates the process of hazard avoidance by using state-of-the-art decision aid algorithms and an open architecture for avionics integration. The performance of the proposed system is also discussed in the paper.