Date of Award

4-2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics

Department

Aeronautics and Astronautics

First Advisor

Karen Marais

Second Advisor

William A. Crossley

Third Advisor

Steven J. Landry

Committee Chair

Karen Marais

Committee Co-Chair

William A. Crossley

Committee Member 1

Steven J. Landry

Abstract

Identifying phases of flight in General Aviation can help in identifying safety events, which are events which may result in the aircraft being in a hazardous state. Unlike commercial operations that have well-defined phases of flight such as taxi, takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, approach, and landing, GA missions have more hard-to-identify phases of flight. For example, pilot training missions can involve multiple “touch-and-go” maneuvers, which make it difficult to define a distinct cruise phase during the patterns. Here, we present an algorithm to automatically identifying phases of flight in GA. The method includes an algorithm to tailor the phase of flight identification for flights from different regions. We demonstrate our approach on 376 different flights from Cirrus SR20 and Cessna C172 aircraft equipped with a Garmin G1000 avionics system.

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