Energy Management for Unstable Approach Detection

This paper presents a generic approach for detecting unstable approaches through energy management. Airlines standard operating procedures used for detecting unstable approaches are different from one airline to the other so that occurrences in one airline cannot be used for benchmarking purpose on other airlines. An approach proposed in this paper is motivated by the fact that unstable approach is caused by the inability to manage aircraft’s energy required for conducting a stable approach. Therefore, quantifying the minimum energy required by stable approach is a necessary condition for detecting the approach type. A workable algorithm is developed and implemented on 2,000 flights landing at the same airport. Results show that unstable approaches detected by energy management are also included in the procedure-based results. This finding indicates that energy management-based unstable approach provides a generic approach for detecting unstable approaches which can be used for benchmarking purpose. In addition to that, the method proposed in this paper also requires fewer parameters in the analysis compared to the standard operating procedures which include many parameters to be analyzed for the same purpose.