Autonomous and Air-Ground Cooperative Onboard Systems for Surface Movement Incident Prevention

At airports sustaining commercial operations, Runway Incursions, defined as the incorrect presence or manoeuvre of an aircraft, vehicle or person on a runway, constitute the most severe hazard to flight safety. In fact, the worst-ever accident in civil aviation to date, the collision of two Boeing B747s on Tenerife in March 1977 with 583 fatalities, was caused by a Runway Incursion. As early as 1986, a special investigation report of the National Transportation Safety Boards (NTSB), which is responsible for investigating aviation incidents and accidents in the USA, concluded that Human Factors issues and not technical malfunctions were the primary causal factors of Runway Incursions. This is remarkable, because although surface movement is one of the most challenging cockpit tasks, pilots are currently not supported by sophisticated assistance systems in this critical phase of flight, but still mainly rely on visual acquisition of their environment and Air Traffic Control (ATC) instructions conveyed via radio. The only mandatory additional equipment consists of paper charts, compass and Notices to Airmen (NOTAM). Consequently, the goal of this thesis is to investigate to what extent Runway Incursions can be attributed to an inadequate presentation or lack of required information on the flight deck, and how flight deck instrumentation will possibly have to be supplemented in order to increase safety in the airport environment. Following a scrutiny of current procedures for surface movement with respect to potential deficiencies, an in-depth analysis of 40 incidents and accidents is conducted to identify and categorize generic, recurring causal factors of Runway Incursions. Apart from several exceptions that can be attributed to incorrect ATC instructions or clearances, results clearly indicate that the investigated Runway Incursions were primarily caused by a lack of pilot situation awareness. The underlying reasons are a lack of suitable navigation aids, missing means of acquiring the surrounding traffic including potential conflicts, insufficient presentation of information on the airport operational environment (such as closed or restricted runways) or misunderstandings in the communication with ATC. In order to address these deficiencies, a holistic flight deck visualisation and warning concept based on Airport Moving Map (AMM) technology, an already commercially available database-driven electronic airport chart presentation, is developed in the frame of this thesis, integrating all of the information required for Runway Incursion avoidance in an intuitive fashion. In case the mere presentation of information is not sufficient to prevent a hazardous situation, e.g. due to the dynamics of an emerging traffic conflict, pilots are alerted in a manner consistent with current flight deck alerting systems. A prototypic realisation of the resulting onboard surveillance system is validated with airline pilots in field trials at Frankfurt and Prague airport, using a Navigation Test Vehicle, followed by a further evaluation campaign employing a Research Flight Simulator