Assured Contingency Landing Management for Advanced Air Mobility

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is quickly developing as a new air transportation system with increasing autonomy levels to support low-cost on-demand passenger and package transport. AAM must operate safely despite the potential to encounter hazards and experience anomalies and failures in-flight. It becomes especially important to have systematic auto-mitigation strategies to perform safe contingency actions in AAM flight operations, as pilots have limited Situational Awareness (SA) and limited time to make decisions when encountering failures/anomalies in complex airspace and terrain. This paper presents Assured Contingency Landing Management (ACLM) with an online landing strategy selection capability to decide between the following three options when a contingency landing is required: (1) Return-to-launch landing, (2) Land immediately at a nearby clear but unprepared site, and (3) Land at a prepared landing site within the aircraft’s reachable footprint. Our presented algorithm shows a real-time auto-mitigation loop with multiple threads that run simultaneously to check controllability, reachability, and intermediate decisions to hold/ loiter or continue the flight plan as the landing strategy solution is being computed. A simulation case study demonstrates ACLM with a focus on safety-critical propulsion and battery system degradation scenarios to illustrate ACLM functionality.