After major adverse impact that volcano eruption had on aviation in April 2010, when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in Iceland, there is a high need for all airspace users to gather up and contribute to new solutions of problem solving. Based on the lessons learned from that event, any airspace user, no matter what kind of operations it provides, is in need first for concrete regulations on which level of ash concentration is hazardous for the aircraft, second more precise prediction of ash-cloud movements and third for opportunity to be a part of the decision making process concerning question whether to fly or not in this specific situation and if yes through zones of which volcanic ash concentration and following which procedures.
In that respect DLR’s Institute of Flight Guidance started the research process in the direction of airspace reconstruction, flight strategies development and decision making process weather to fly or not in the disruptive event.
This paper, therefore, presents:
- firstly, short description of the ATM concept that could be a solid base in order to ensure flow of valid information and possibilities to transfer decision making role from states and ANSPs to airliners and definitely to pilots,
- secondly, specific developed fly strategies when airborne volcanic ash is present in part of the airspace while trying to maintain capacity level on the highest possible level and
- lastly, development of different criteria for traffic flow management in order to optimize usage of available non-contaminated part of the airspace.
All presented results are from the first stage of research process, thus in the end, discussion on advantages of using this approach and criteria as well as problems that have appeared during the first stage of the development process will be presented. Concerning results from this stage, planes for further steps in research process will be presented, too.
Weather conditions have a major impact on air traffic management in planning as well as in flight. Ever since the volcanic eruptions in 2010 caused enormous disturbance of air traffic over Europe, much effort has gone into the task of finding clear routes to deal with aviation obstacles like ash clouds or hazardous weather. In this contribution the development of a 4D optimization model of a trajectory-based air traffic management is described. The model makes use of a multicriteria cost function which takes into account fuel flow, time, distance and the specialized performance parameters for an aircraft. We create an individual network for each flight in which the Single Flight Routing Problem can be formulated as a minimum cost single commodity network flow problem, widely known as the shortest path problem. Solutions are generated using the A∗ algorithm, which is a modified version of Dijkstra's algorithm. The Multiple Flight Routing Problem is formulated as a dynamic multicommodity network flow problem. We generate feasible solutions using Lagrangian relaxation in combination with a Lagrangian based heuristic.
The volcanic eruption that occurred in Iceland in April 2010 (the Eyjafjallajökull eruption) had an adversely impact on aviation in Europe. This event then spurred aviation key actors into action, so leading experts gathered up to, firstly, define issues that had to be solved and, secondly, to try to prepare aviation for the eventual volcanic ash event in future. The progress was already noticeable just a year later (in May 2011), when another volcanic eruption occurred in Iceland (the Grimsvötn eruption). At that time the impact on aviation was already much lower than in 2010. These days, we witness the development process in information exchange area and regulations area in Europe. EUROCONTROL established a new tool called EVITA which provides a better data exchange process in a volcanic ash event and civil aviation authorities among Europe developed a new regulation approach providing the possibility for airlines to be the part of the decision making process concerning the question whether to fly or not in the contaminated airspace. But is there a possibility to have an improvement in other areas, too? Can we progress towards the process of forecasting movements of an ash-cloud more precisely and using that information the improvement of operational efficiency while maintaining safety in a crisis period? What are the tools that we need for this purpose? Institute of Flight Guidance (DLR - German Aerospace Center) is currently working on a development of a new volcanic ash event concept in order to try to answer those questions. This concept is called "pilot in-charge" and connote that the role of the decision maker whether to fly or not should be assigned to a pilot. Development of this concept is at the end of its first phase (the objective and assessment of technical possibilities to achieve it are established). The final phase should be a development of FMS (back-up support system for pilots when there is a presence of an ash-cloud in the air) that is going to be able of proposing, planning and optimizing a flight path in-flight.
After the prolonged disruption to aviation caused by volcanic ash injected in atmosphere via volcano Eyjafjallajökull (Iceland) in April and May 2010 aviation society in Europe established the system of three volcanic ash concentration zones (low, medium and high) based on correlation between concentration level and safety and allowed flight operations in areas of low concentration. Nevertheless, airspace unusable for operators and manufacturers is still demarcated by the presence of "visible ash" but the clear definition of that term is unfortunately not yet defined. In order to contribute to determining and using of the term "visible ash" the video that shows visibility level in the vicinity of volcano Eyjafjallajökull after the eruption in June, 2010 is used for the discussion. Several different snapshots are presented and information generated out of them used as the input data for a mathematical calculation of the visibility situation of the volcanic ash concentration boundaries upon which internationally recognized volcanic ash concentration zones are defined. In the end, a preliminary visibility threshold for flight operations in areas contaminated with volcanic ash is proposed and discussed.
Current European regulation that allows flying in forecasted, differently contaminated, volcanic ash zones as long as specific Safety Risk Assessment (SRA) is approved has the goal to reduce adverse impact that volcanic ash ejected in the atmosphere can have on air traffic management (ATM). However, the European States do not have unique understanding of this approach meaning that, in a few cases, States still decide to close their airspace in case of ash presence. Therefore, in this contribution, we analyze how definition of flying area within SRA and different State’s approach affect operations. We use volcanic ash data from the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO’s) volcanic ash exercise (VOLCEX13/01) and daily European traffic for simulation.
Large areas of the European airspace have been affected by volcanic ash clouds during the past volcanic eruptions resulting in widespread disruption to air traffic. Future strategies for the air transportation system should reduce negative impacts during a volcanic eruption. To assist in these investigations this contribution shows an successful approach for a simulation environment which optimizes trajectories during a volcanic eruption. The existing simulation environment provided by DLR’s Institute of Flight Guidance is expanded with some newly developed components in order to meet the new requirements. It is described how the existing computation of realistic trajectories was associated with the new component for trajectory optimization. The optimization algorithm is illustrated by a single trajectory optimization. An exemplary air traffic analysis based on data which was recorded during the Grimsvotn eruption shows first results.
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