Design of an Advanced Flight Planning System

The demand for both fuel conservation and 4-D traffic management require that the pre-flight planning process be designed to account for advances in airborne flight management and weather forecasting. The steps and issues in designing such an advanced flight planning system are presented. Focus is placed on the different optimization options for generating the 3-D reference path. For the cruise phase, one can use pre-defined jet routes, direct routes based on a network of evenly spaced grid points, or a network where the grid points are existing navaid locations. Each choice has its own problem in determining an optimum solution. Finding the reference path is further complicated by choice of cruise altitude levels, use of a time-varying weather field, and requiring a fixed time-of-arrivaal (4-D problem).