Multidisciplinary methods for evaluation and optimisation of aircraft flight performance.

The aviation today is an increasing global market with 2.2 billion passengers travelling everyday due to the convenience that the air transportation has reached. Long term forecasts indicate that this growth will intensify and continue with a minimum of 2% passenger growth per year for the next two decades. This traffic growth will push to the limit the actual air traffic management and airspace systems that cannot handle such volume of increase traffic. The air transportation growth not only affects the current global air transportation system, but also has both local and global impacts on the environment. In addition, aviation also generates significant noisy environmental effects to the population living in the vicinity of the terminal area. Nowadays the aviation can use several procedures developed as first step for noise abatement and direct cost are managed by the on-board systems. The challenge is to introduce the future 4D trajectory management concept within on-board systems to manage the flight trajectory to optimize emissions, noise impact, contrails formation and also gate to gate flight time. Most of the previous studies have been focused on optimizing trajectories phases for a specifi c case only and without considering the operational level that need to be taken into account for a real gate to gate as described by the new Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO) concept. This report shows the work that has been done to create a virtual flight environment where the flight management systems can be tested and evaluated respect to those new requirements requested for the future generation air traffic rules. Trajectory optimization is implemented to calculate the optimal trajectory that minimize emissions and noise impact based on city pair air route in an operational level with realistic constraints and environment conditions. Multi-phase optimal control models the flight phases and control intermediate states of the aircraft. The ultimate trajectories are tested within the simulation environment to assess 4D trajectory performance and conceptual aircraft flight performances. The feedbacks can be used by the aircraft designers to modify the conceptual aircraft in the case the performances are not met.