IEEE Access (Jan 2022)

E-Pilots: A System to Predict Hard Landing During the Approach Phase of Commercial Flights

  • Debora Gil,
  • Aura Hernandez-Sabate,
  • Julien Enconniere,
  • Saryani Asmayawati,
  • Pau Folch,
  • Juan Borrego-Carazo,
  • Miquel Angel Piera

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3138167
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10
pp. 7489 – 7503

Abstract

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More than half of all commercial aircraft operation accidents could have been prevented by executing a go-around. Making timely decision to execute a go-around manoeuvre can potentially reduce overall aviation industry accident rate. In this paper, we describe a cockpit-deployable machine learning system to support flight crew go-around decision-making based on the prediction of a hard landing event. This work presents a hybrid approach for hard landing prediction that uses features modelling temporal dependencies of aircraft variables as inputs to a neural network. Based on a large dataset of 58177 commercial flights, the results show that our approach has 85% of average sensitivity with 74% of average specificity at the go-around point. It follows that our approach is a cockpit-deployable recommendation system that outperforms existing approaches.

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