Automatic Commercial Aircraft Formation Flight

Abstract

This paper describes the new concept for commercial aviation transport using the automatic formation flight issues. The largest part of the work is dedicated to new airport concepts for formation flight operations. The idea was extracted from the operations that are performed commonly on large airports with close spaced parallel runways in North America. These operations are called paired approaches where one airplane follows the other on final approach. Main goals of this paper were to bring concepts that would be able to increase the airport runway system capacity, an increase in airspace capacity, to reduce fuel consumption and to create an idea on how the future air transport could look like. We have found out that some of designed concepts and procedures could be used, however, they will require more researches and development in aerodynamics and systems.