Problems and prospects of ensuring the safety of civil aviation

Currently, civil aviation is the safest transport. However, accidents and disasters are one of the favorite topics in the media. This leads to the fact that there are many people who are afraid to fly airplanes.

In this post we will look at what is the biggest danger of flying and what can be done about it.

Landing problem

If you go to Wikipedia and see the statistics of modern air crashes, you can be sure that most accidents and disasters are related to the landing of an aircraft. This is the so-called "Collision with the ground in a controlled flight" , in English - Controlled flight into terrain, CFIT. It also says: "The main causes of CFIT are: pilot errors (especially in adverse weather conditions), malfunctioning or unstable navigation equipment." However, some cases of undershoot / flight during landing do not apply to CFIT, but with respect to the subject of this article, this observation does not really matter.
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What is the problem of landing the aircraft? The fact is that the aircraft is a rather fragile structure, and piloting is a rather complicated process, since air is a medium with low density. When landing, the aircraft must follow the landing glide with high accuracy in order to get to the beginning of the runway with a certain course and speed. The lack of flight leads to damage to the landing gear of the aircraft and disaster, a large flight - to the impossibility of stopping the movement in time with similar consequences. In addition, the approach process begins at a great distance from the aerodrome, landing may occur in bad weather conditions, etc.

Solution to the problem

To ensure the safety of flights near the ground and the approach, various systems were developed - TAWS (Land Alert Warning System), course-glide systems - ILS (meter range), MLS (centimeter range), radionavigation systems - Western VOR / DME and Soviet RSBN.

The most advanced systems - ILS and MLS in their latest versions allow landing without visibility.



When leaving the aircraft away from the correct glide path at the course or height, there is a difference of signals and a warning is issued.



In this case, the pilot sees that he needs to send the plane to the left and slightly up.

Decision problems

There are many problems with the application of various systems - dependence on human actions, failure of equipment (both ground and airborne), interference, etc.

For quite a long time, there is no significant progress in the air navigation and automatic flight control devices. If you look at the development of electronics, automation, man-machine interfaces, then it can be noted that the gap between the consumer segment and the segment of application of all this in aviation has grown significantly. In the 80s, aeronautical equipment and control systems are practically Hi-tech at the forefront, now they are reliable, but traditional solutions.
Why did this happen? This is nothing complicated, everything is logical. Civil aviation is a fairly conservative industry, where reliability and safety are at the forefront. And it is right. But now it has become an excuse for maintaining the status quo in the aviation market. This is a very expensive business to get certified. And it is very difficult to lobby to make your decision as a standard.

Modern development of technology and software allows you to create small and light equipment that can significantly improve the safety of civil aviation.

For this you need to solve several problems:
1) Ensuring the reliability of the equipment
2) Ensuring precision guidance
3) Providing the necessary weight and size indicators
4) Ensuring noise immunity

In addition, the reduction of various methods of targeting the aircraft on the course will avoid overloading the cockpit interface.

Ensuring reliability is completely solved by duplicating (cold and hot) nodes responsible for processing and storing the incoming information, while having several guidance systems based on different principles, with the consistency of their readings, will allow, in theory, to land even in automated mode.

For example, to drive an airplane on the glide path and land, you can navigate using GPS (bringing to the necessary point to start descending), systems with ground-based emitters (ILS type), you can also equip the airport with passive radio reflectors in the defined configuration from the aircraft to land (with the ability to change the frequency and knowledge of the spectral characteristics of the sent signal provides a very high noise immunity of this system).

Having our own radar on board (modern aircraft are equipped with them) we can also solve many related tasks: if you place the same radio reflectors on an aircraft, you can automatically make oncoming planes (air collisions are not so rare).

Naturally, to solve these problems on the plane should be a radar with a course phased antenna array of high resolution.

I would like to develop such systems on the principle of open source - in order to reduce dependence on ambitions and "fatal flaws" to zero, there was no dependence on licenses, and there, who knows, perhaps due to the absence of protected patents, this could also be in private aviation.

Development prospects

So, what is my understanding of a promising system for preventing collisions with the ground and other aircraft?

First of all - reservation. Modern computing systems have very good weight and size characteristics, as well as low power consumption. In industry, where reliability and safety are also important, a lot of production equipment is controlled by its controllers, information from which comes to the dispatcher, from where they are controlled.
Having distributed all over the fuselage, having connected several duplicate systems with common tires, and prioritizing them, you can count on an increase in reliability.

In addition, the modular design, when a non-working functional unit can be quickly replaced with a serviceable one, will reduce the time for repair and maintenance (the required number of hours has flown away - replacement, testing, maintenance), introducing self-diagnostics in as many places as possible will not only localize the problem, but and, if there is a backup site, quickly eliminate it. Naturally, this should be implemented in such a way that, in the event of any failure, the faulty node could not affect the operation of the rest of the system (noise, short circuit, dangerous voltage levels should not affect the performance of other modules or data transfer).

Another very slippery problem is telemetry and remote control. Quite a lot of accidents and incidents occurred due to non-compliance with discipline or pilot errors. On the other hand, getting control of the aircraft from the outside is a rather dangerous possibility. The use of biometric devices to monitor the status of the crew can be one of the outputs. In a state of panic, confusion, severe fatigue, the reaction slows down, coordination deteriorates, and so on. In this case, taking control can be a good way out. And vulnerabilities in this system should not be.

Now consider the problem of navigation and proximity to objects. The positioning system greatly facilitates the work of the pilot. If the approaching ships transfer their coordinates to each other, this will be another channel, apart from the radar and the dispatcher, to prevent collisions in the air or on the runway. A phased multiband heading array, together with a specific configuration of radio reflectors on airplanes, can also prevent an air collision. To do this, of course, the appropriate software must be implemented, which will alert the pilot and give a recommendation on how to prevent a catastrophe.
When approaching the ground, the distance to it is controlled by a radio altimeter; when landing in conditions of poor visibility, this is not always sufficient. Applying, for example, infrared cameras of certain ranges, arranging heating elements on the strip and transmitting the image to the monitor in the pilot's cabin can significantly improve the accuracy of the landing.

Using radio reflectors on the band, millimeter-wave waves, adaptive transmitters on board, you can build a system that allows landing in any meteorological conditions at any time of the day.

Software development for such systems is one of the most difficult tasks. If everything is more or less well developed with iron, then software modularity can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. There are many questions in this area, but few convincing answers. And this is one more reason why the creation of a flexible and secure flight control system is delayed.

It is possible that after reading this article, someone will become interested in the problem of ensuring flight safety, become the general designer, and we will someday have even safer civil aviation.