A Pilot Decision Support Tool for Merging behind a Lead Aircraft

This air traffic management study designed a cockpit tool for assisting pilots to achieve a constant time delay behind a lead aircraft. A system architecture for manual and automatic `merge´ and `remain´ modes was proposed with required design and performance requirements. A manual `merge´ guidance mode suggesting calibrated airspeed was developed for aircraft on converging trajectories. The control law reduced pilot speed actions by using lead aircraft history to anticipate large speed changes. This control mode was tuned and validated using descent profiles recorded from real-time experiments and a pilot model in the loop. The number of calibrated airspeed adjustments needed to maintain spacing was found to significantly decrease when the lead aircraft history based prediction was used.