Predictive information for improved flight safety assessment

It is widely accepted that human error is a major contributing factor in aircraft accidents. The early detection of a subsystem abnormality that is developing during flight is potentially important, because the extra time before an alert range is reached may improve the crew´s situation awareness. The flight crew may thus consider and try more options for dealing with the failure situation. Techniques are proposed for rapid recognition of faulty situations which have the potential for such early detection. The warning system includes a modelbased multi-step ahead predictor which provides predictive information on some flight critical parameters. The system is tested on a simulated typical landing approach scenario of a civil aircraft using the RCAM benchmark.