Evaluation of Aircraft Performance Variation During Daily Flight Operations

Abstract

A novel energy-based methodology to predict the flight performance within an entire aircraft fleet based on flight data records is presented. It combines knowledge about the aircraft's flight mechanics with statistical methods and estimation techniques to solve the big data problem. Therefore, this method provides a new smart way to analyze the flight data of modern aircraft during daily flight operations (normal airline operation) to monitor the change of individual aircraft characteristics. The methodology is described in detail first, validated with simulated flight data afterwards and finally applied to flight data of more than 75000 flights with a Boeing B737 fleet. The corresponding very promising results show that this distinct knowledge-based methodology allows to reliably predict the aircraft flight performance variation and can easily overcome several shortcomings such as poor data resolution or limited quality.