Flight Safety Assessment and Management for Takeoff Using Deterministic Moore Machines

This paper presents a novel flight safety assessment and management augmentation to the flight management system designed to assist a flight crew in avoiding or recovering from impending loss-of-control situations. Nominally, this system serves as a passive monitor but, in high-risk situations, warnings and (ultimately) override actions are initiated to mitigate the high-risk situation. In this work, flight safety assessment and management is applied to the task of preserving safety during takeoff, which is one of the highest-risk phases of flight. Flight safety assessment and management is specified as a deterministic Moore machine that can ultimately be certified using existing software certification processes. To facilitate understanding and to reduce state-space complexity, flight safety assessment and management’s state machines are split into longitudinal and lateral-directional submachines that identify and mitigate loss-of-control contributing factors associated with aircraft dynamics and control ...