Gate-iInformer: Enhancing Long-Sequence Fuel Forecasting in Aviation via Inverted Transformers and Gating Networks

Accurately predicting aircraft fuel consumption is vital for aviation safety, operational efficiency, and resource optimization, yet existing models face key limitations. Traditional physical models rely on prior assumptions, while mainstream deep learning models use fixed architectures and time-slice tokens—failing to adapt to distinct flight phases and losing long-range temporal features critical for cross-phase dependency capture. This paper proposes Gate-iInformer, an adaptive framework centered on iInformer with a gating network. It treats flight parameters as independent tokens, integrates Informer to handle long-range dependencies, and uses the gating network to dynamically select pre-trained phase-specific sub-models. Validated on 21,000 Air China 2023 medium-aircraft flights, it reduces MAE and RMSE by up to 53.38% and 44.51%, achieves 0.068 MAE in landing, and outperforms benchmarks. Its prediction latency is under 0.5 s, meeting ADS-B needs. Future work will expand data sources to enhance generalization, boosting aviation intelligent operation.