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Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
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ItemImpact of Adverse Weather on Commercial Helicopter Pilot Decision-Making and Standard Operating Procedures(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08) Speirs, Andrew H. ; Ramee, Coline ; Payan, Alexia P. ; Mavris, Dimitri N. ; Feigh, Karen M.Helicopter pilots face unique challenges with regard to adverse weather when compared to fixed-wing pilots. Rotorcraft typically operate at lower altitudes in off-field areas that are not always well covered by weather reporting stations. Although recent technological advances have increased the amount of weather data that pilots can access in the cockpit, weather remains a factor in 28% of fatal helicopter accidents. In this work, commercial helicopter pilots were surveyed and interviewed to better understand how they gather and process weather information, what the perceived limitations of current weather tools are, and how their decision-making process is affected by the information they gather and/or receive. Pilots were found to use a wide variety of weather sources for their initial go or no-go decision during the preflight phase, but use fewer weather sources in the cockpit while in-flight. Pilots highlighted the sparsity and sometimes inaccuracy of the weather information available to them in their prototypical operational domain. To compensate, they are forced to rely on local and experiential weather knowledge to supplement weather reports while still working to mitigate other external pressures. Based on the literature and on results from this work, recommendations are made to address the weather-related gaps faced by the rotorcraft community. This includes the installation of additional weather reporting stations outside of airports and densely populated areas, the further promotion of the HEMS tool to helicopter pilots in all industries, the development of weather tools capable of visualizing light precipitation such as fog, and the development of in-flight graphical displays that can help reduce the cognitive workload of interpreting weather information.
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ItemAnalysis of Weather-Related Helicopter Accidents and Incidents in the United States(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08) Ramee, Coline ; Speirs, Andrew H. ; Payan, Alexia P. ; Mavris, Dimitri N.Helicopters typically operate at lower altitudes than fixed-wing aircraft and can take-off and land away from airports. Thus, helicopter pilots have decreased access to weather information due to connectivity issues or sparsity of weather coverage in those areas and at those altitudes. Moreover, regulations allow most rotorcraft to operate in marginal weather conditions. Therefore, weather is a challenge to rotorcraft operations. In this study, rotorcraft events in the United States between 2008 and 2018 in which weather was determined to be a factor are analyzed using the National Transportation Safety Board aviation database. Results show that weather was a factor in 28% of rotorcraft fatal accidents. Wind was involved in most incidents but more rarely involved in fatalities. Bad visibility conditions due to a combination of low illumination and clouds were responsible for most fatal weather-related accidents. Personal flights had the highest accident and incident rates. Finally, the Helicopter Air Ambulance industry had the largest number of incidents and accidents related to visibility conditions out of all other industries. The authors recommend improving awareness of the conditions in which weather events occur and improving training to maintain control of the aircraft in windy conditions or during inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions.
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ItemHelicopter Operations Weather Information Pilot Interviews(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-01-29) Speirs, Andrew ; Ramee, Coline ; Alexia, Payan ; Mavris, Dimitri N. ; Feigh, Karen M.Helicopter pilots face unique challenges with regard to adverse weather when compared to fixed-wing pilots. Rotorcraft typically operate at lower altitudes in off-field areas that are not always well covered by weather reporting stations. Although recent technological advances have increased the amount of weather data that pilots can access in the cockpit, weather remains a factor in 28% of fatal helicopter accidents. In this work, commercial helicopter pilots were interviewed to better understand how they gather and process weather information, what the perceived limitations of current weather tools are, and how their decision-making process is affected by the information they gather and/or receive.
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ItemDevelopment of a Framework to Compare Low-Altitude Unmanned Air Traffic Management Systems(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-01) Ramee, Coline ; Mavris, Dimitri N.Several reports forecast a very high demand for Urban Air Mobility services such as package delivery and air taxi. This would lead to very dense low-altitude operations which cannot be safely accommodated by the current air traffic management system. Many different architectures for low-altitude air traffic management have been proposed in the literature, however, the lack of a common framework makes it difficult to compare strategies. The work presented here establishes efficiency, safety and capacity metrics, defines the components of an automated traffic management system architecture and introduces a preliminary framework to compare different alternatives. This common framework allows for the evaluation and comparison of different alternatives for unmanned traffic management. The framework is showcased on different strategies with different architectures. The impact of algorithmic choices and airspace architectures is evaluated. A decoupled approach to 4D trajectory planning is shown to scale poorly with agents density. The impact of segregating traffic by heading is shown to be very different depending on the algorithms and airspace access rules chosen.
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ItemHelicopter Operations Weather Information Survey Dataset(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-11-23) Payan, Alexia P. ; Ramee, Coline ; Speirs, Andrew ; Mavris, Dimitri N. ; Feigh, Karen M.To better understand the kind of weather information used by rotorcraft operators and get their opinion on the weather products that are available to them, the research team created an online survey. The survey consisted of three main sections: 1) Demographics, 2) Flight environment, and 3) Safety Operations. The information collected was used to analyze the number and types of weather information sources used by pilots in different phases of flight, identify differences between industries and study pilots training for adverse weather conditions. The data contained here is an anonymized version of answers to the survey.
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ItemAircraft Flight Plan Optimization with Dynamic Weather and Airspace Constraints(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020) Ramee, Coline ; Junghyun, Kim ; Deguignet, Marie ; Justin, Cedric ; Briceno, Simon ; Mavris, Dimitri N.Flight planning is the process of producing a flight plan which describes a proposed aircraft trajectory. This task is typically performed ahead of departure with the intent of minimizing operating costs, while accounting for weather, airspace, traffic, and comfort considerations. Recent improvements in cockpit connectivity present new opportunities for flight crews to continuously re-assess the trajectories once in the air using the latest information sets (weather observations and forecasts, traffic). In turn, this enables flight crews to proactively respond to the uncertain evolution of the weather by steering the aircraft along optimal trajectories. This also brings new challenges as flight crews are ill-equipped to continuously process vast amount of information to perform the trajectory optimization. A framework is therefore proposed to automate the fusion of various sources of information (severe weather, winds aloft, restricted airspace) to feed a trajectory optimizer that continuously updates the aircraft trajectory. This relies on the implementation of the A* algorithm with the objective to minimize cruise fuel burn and emissions. Use-cases are investigated by comparing continuously updated trajectories with actual flight trajectories retrieved from the FAA Traffic Flow Management Systems through consumer-oriented websites. Promising results are observed with fuel burn savings reaching 8%.