4D Without Airborne FMS

Abstract

One part of the answer to future demands in air transport like gain of capacity, reduction of environmental impact, improved flight efficiency and high predictability is often the term “4D”. Having a look at today’s fleet only one out of nine aircraft is able to fulfill a requested time of arrival with a tolerance of +/-6 seconds. Therefore, the success of a concept based on advanced airborne capabilities and their integration in a 4D-ATM environment hardly depends on how especially the unequipped aircraft without flight management system (FMS) fit into the concept. DLR’s Institute of Flight Guidance investigates a new concept based on 4D-trajectories for both modern aircraft equipped with a flight management system and unequipped aircraft. This paper introduces a navigation performance adapted concept that allows high throughput for airports dealing with mixed traffic. Furthermore, heaving already much experience with guidance of 4D-equipped aircraft, an example implementation of a ground based guidance module for 4D-uncapable aircraft is presented.