WIND-AWARE TRAJECTORY OPTIMIZATION FOR UNMANNED AIRCRAFT REVEALS UNCERTAINTY-DEPENDENT TRAVEL-TIME BENEFITS

Atmospheric winds influence unmanned aircraft flight duration, and distanceminimizing routes may not provide minimum travel times when wind conditions vary across geographic locations and time.This study developed and evaluated a timedependent, wind-aware trajectory optimization framework using historical NASA Global Hawk flight measurements from the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts atmospheric reanalysis version 5 (ERA5).Aircraft-measured winds were compared with reanalysis estimates across five flight segments to characterize meteorological uncertainty.A graph-based routing algorithm then compared distance-minimizing and minimum-time trajectories under fixed-pressure and fixed-true-airspeed assumptions.Numerical verification assessed route-representation consistency, integration convergence, and search validity.Additional simulations examined trajectory performance under perturbed atmospheric conditions, including separate wind realizations for route optimization and evaluation.