Experimental Flight Management System: An Air Traffic Management Research Tool

摘要

There can be little doubt that Air Traffic Management of the future will demand high technology on board and on the ground. In Europe, a collaborative research program called PHARE (Program for Harmonized ATM Research in Eurocontrol) aims to investigate a future ATM scenario by, amongst others, actual development and flight tests of an Experimental Flight Management System (EFMS). The EFMS will incorporate some revolutionary features, of which the most important are to plan and fly a 4 dimensional trajectory and to negotiate that trajectory via a digital data link with ATC. Development is a multi-national activity of the aerospace centers of Germany, France, England and the Netherlands, coordinated by Eurocontrol. The paper describes the EFMS program and focuses on some details of it. A number of applications are briefly described, most notably the Avionic Research Testbed of the National Aerospace Laboratory.