Enhancing Flight Safety Through Improved Integration of Digital Elevation Models to Flight Modeling Software

Commercial airports require routine recertification to ensure the safety of planes and passengers. To support this process, software has been developed to integrate Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) into two flight navigational aid multipath modeling programs: the Ohio University Glideslope Model (OUGS), which predicts glide slope system performance in non-uniform terrain, and the Ohio University NAVAID Performance Prediction Model (OUNPPM), which simulates localizer, glide slope, and VHF omnidirectional ranging (VOR) system behavior. This integration aims to improve model accuracy for enhanced flight safety. The new software collects DEM data from the USGS's National map in the form of Geo-Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF) files, which store elevation data as raster grids, where each pixel represents reflects the elevation at a specific geographic point. A webscraper downloads and saves these TIFF files, which are accessed via an Application Programming Interface (API). The API constructs a 2D array of elevation data for the selected area with data from saved DEMs. This array is shrunk using bi-linear interpolation to reduce its size while preserving the data's integrity. By reducing the resolution from 300px to 150px, the size of the dataset drops from 1.28 MB to 327 KB while keeping accuracy relatively unchanged. Processing time is reduced from 5.83s to 1.45s. which allows for fast and efficient data input with little loss of detail in terrain. Interpolation can be applied to create smaller datasets, reducing size while maintaining relative accuracy.