Airspace-aware Contingency Landing Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Tekaslan, H. Emre, Atkins, Ella M.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Tekaslan, H. Emre
Atkins, Ella M.
author_facet Tekaslan, H. Emre
Atkins, Ella M.
contents This paper develops a real-time, search-based aircraft contingency landing planner that minimizes traffic disruptions while accounting for ground risk. The airspace model captures dense air traffic departure and arrival flows, helicopter corridors, and prohibited zones and is demonstrated with a Washington, D.C., area case study. Historical Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data are processed to estimate air traffic density. A low-latency computational geometry algorithm generates proximity-based heatmaps around high-risk corridors and restricted regions. Airspace risk is quantified as the cumulative exposure time of a landing trajectory within congested regions, while ground risk is assessed from overflown population density to jointly guide trajectory selection. A landing site selection module further mitigates disruption to nominal air traffic operations. Benchmarking against minimum-risk Dubins solutions demonstrates that the proposed planner achieves lower joint risk and reduced airspace disruption while maintaining real-time performance. Under airspace-risk-only conditions, the planner generates trajectories within an average of 2.9 seconds on a laptop computer. Future work will incorporate dynamic air traffic updates to enable spatiotemporal contingency landing planning that minimizes the need for real-time traffic rerouting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07074
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Airspace-aware Contingency Landing Planning
Tekaslan, H. Emre
Atkins, Ella M.
Robotics
Systems and Control
This paper develops a real-time, search-based aircraft contingency landing planner that minimizes traffic disruptions while accounting for ground risk. The airspace model captures dense air traffic departure and arrival flows, helicopter corridors, and prohibited zones and is demonstrated with a Washington, D.C., area case study. Historical Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data are processed to estimate air traffic density. A low-latency computational geometry algorithm generates proximity-based heatmaps around high-risk corridors and restricted regions. Airspace risk is quantified as the cumulative exposure time of a landing trajectory within congested regions, while ground risk is assessed from overflown population density to jointly guide trajectory selection. A landing site selection module further mitigates disruption to nominal air traffic operations. Benchmarking against minimum-risk Dubins solutions demonstrates that the proposed planner achieves lower joint risk and reduced airspace disruption while maintaining real-time performance. Under airspace-risk-only conditions, the planner generates trajectories within an average of 2.9 seconds on a laptop computer. Future work will incorporate dynamic air traffic updates to enable spatiotemporal contingency landing planning that minimizes the need for real-time traffic rerouting.
title Airspace-aware Contingency Landing Planning
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07074