On the Use of Deep Neural Networks to Improve Flights Estimated Time of Arrival Predictions

Abstract

Predictable operations are the basis of efficient air traffic management. In this context, accurately estimating the arrival time to the destination airport is fundamental to make tactical decisions about an optimal schedule of landing and take-off operations. In this paper, we evaluate different deep learning models based on LSTM architectures for predicting estimated time of arrival of commercial flights, mainly using surveillance data from OpenSky Network. We observed that the number of previous states of the flight used to make the prediction have great influence on the accuracy of the estimation, independently of the architecture. The best model, with an input sequence length of 50, has reported a MAE of 3.33 min and a RMSE of 5.42 min on the test set, with MAE values of 5.67 and 2.13 min 90 and 15 min before the end of the flight, respectively.