Fly safe Overview

Project Overview

FLYSAFE has been designed on the basis of six driving factors:

1.    The beginning of the project was dedicated to the joint review, by the team, of the results of past and on-going investigation of accidents and incidents, with the identification of all contributing causes. Among these causes the team selected elements that can be suppressed with innovative Next Generation Integrated Surveillance Systems (NG ISS), thus reducing the occurrence of accidents and incidents.
The results of this analysis will then feed the evaluation tasks with scenarios that will be used to assess new versus state-of-the-art technologies.

FLYSAFE overall concept

2.    There are three main types of hazards sources for aviation: adverse atmospheric conditions, traffic and terrain. This has led to the creation of three branches in the FLYSAFE work breakdown structure (WBS): one per hazard category, interacting with the others, and a fourth branch dedicated to the integration of their outputs into the Next Generation Integrated Surveillance System (NG ISS) itself.

• On-board atmospheric information management will increase the detection capabilities on-board aircraft to cover all major sources of atmospheric hazards (wake vortex, windshear, clear air turbulence, icing, thunderstorm) reducing the probability of hazardous encounter by 90% compared to the state-of-the-art system.
• Traffic information management will increase the crew traffic situation awareness and provide them with potential traffic hazards along the flight path. The goal is to reduce the number of TCAS advisories by 50%.
• Terrain information management will increase the crew terrain and obstacle situation awareness and provide them with the potential terrain and obstacle hazards along the flight path. The goal is to reduce the number of TAWS advisories by 50%.

3.    It is a general fact in avionics that hardware integration reduces weight, volume, power consumption and installation cost. The other major advantage of functional integration is to enable the fusion of raw data coming from heterogeneous sources into a didactic presentation. This is especially true for on-board safety systems, and has led to the decision to design an integrated solution rather than other architectures. The hardware integration enables the implementation of innovative system functions:

• Tactical alert management will deliver a tool to help the crew to manage a tactical situation where an immediate response is required from them.
• Intelligent Crew Support will deliver a tool to help the crew with cockpit interface usage and standard procedures application in order to lower the occurrence of Loss of Control situation.
• Strategic data consolidation will deliver a tool, which allows to anticipate any identified risks related to atmospheric phenomena, traffic and terrain, along the flight path in all flight phases.
• Displays and audio management will deliver an advanced human machine interface enabling 3D exocentric synthetic vision and interactive control and commands.

4.    To meet the overall aviation safety objectives, specific studies on atmospheric hazards have been initiated, with the aim of capitalising on the most recent progress in forecasting and nowcasting of meteorological phenomena, and of implementing their translation into hazards for aviation. Special emphasis is given to the spatial scales and terms that are appropriate to all phases of flight, i.e. from long term, large scale forecast during the flight preparation phase, down to the short term and fine spatial resolution diagnostics of atmospheric hazard that are required during take-off and landing.

5.    Standardisation and certification activities will pave the way for the introduction and promotion of future products, thus reducing the time to market.

6.    Human factors are a common aspect of all hazard sources. They will ensure that all FLYSAFE results, which are presented to the crew via displays (Navigation display, Side display, Multi function display), will be addressed in a way compatible with the existing environment. This is reflected in the FLYSAFE work breakdown structure as a transverse task, which will be consolidated in the Next Generation Integrated Surveillance System branch.

The domain addressed by the FLYSAFE IP is Air Transport. Nevertheless, throughout the project, the FLYSAFE team will analyse the adaptation of project results to other domains such as regional aircraft, business jets and helicopters.