Vehicle-to-Vehicle Approach to Assured Aircraft Emergency Road Landings

This paper introduces an aircraft contingency landing planner that assures safe road-based emergency landings by coordinating air and ground traffic with a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) datalink. Suitable roads within the reachable footprint are extracted from a geographical database and evaluated initially based on road width, live weather, and live traffic flow. Then, a landing trajectory is planned for the road with the highest total utility, ensuring a safe road landing by requesting ground traffic allocate space on the road with the V2V link. Initial landing site utilities are augmented by aircraft landing trajectory metrics, including integrated population density under the landing path, minimum path length constraint derived from assured road landing, and gliding angle. Initial altitude and traffic speed impacts on potential landing sites and assured landings are investigated. A use case in Long Island, New York, is presented in simulation with connected ground traffic and a gliding Cessna 182 aircraft that has experienced loss of thrust. Results confirm analytically obtained safety constraints and illustrate a safe road landing sequence in dense traffic initially moving at normal speeds. We provide a computational cost analysis for this use case, with 71 potential landing sites processed in 300 ms on a laptop computer.