Paper 36 -- Design Of An Airborne Spacing Director To Minimise Pilot Speed Actions

A flight deck tool was designed to assist pilots in acquiring and maintaining a required time delay behind a lead aircraft. A system architecture for manual and automatic merge behind and remain behind modes is proposed with required design and performance criteria. A manual remain guidance mode suggesting calibrated airspeed was developed. The control law minimised pilot speed actions by using lead aircraft history to anticipate large speed changes. This guidance mode was tuned and validated using descent profiles recorded from real-time experiments, and a pilot model in the loop. A sequence of four aircraft was modeled to investigate potential benefits. The number of calibrated airspeed adjustments needed to maintain spacing was found to decrease by at least a factor of three for all trailing aircraft when the lead aircraft history based prediction was used.