Aircraft Weather Data Representation and Threat Management for Connected Weather Applications

Aviation industry has been continuously striving for reducing the number of flight crew in the aircraft cockpit for balancing operational efficiency with the flight economics. Concepts like Reduced Crew Operations (RCO) and Single Pilot Operations (SPO) are being experimented in this direction. In RCO and SPO, additional aid/system is needed for reducing the pilot’s workload and to help him/her in taking right decisions. Weather situational awareness and management of weather-related threats are significant part of the workload the pilot is subjected during the flight. Weather information presented to the pilot in the cockpit is obtained either from an onboard weather radar on larger commercial aircrafts or from other sources like Air Traffic Control, ADS-B Flight Information Services, Connected weather services, etc. Connected weather services are under development to provide accurate and reliable real time weather information to the aircrafts especially to the ones without an onboard weather radar. However, the cost of sharing the weather information through Airborne datalinks is directly related to the size of the weather data. The usefulness of weather data relies on the flight crew’s ability to interpret the weather data manually and take appropriate flight decision to avoid hazardous weather zones. But, in RCO and SPO, the Pilot is subjected to high workload by having to interpret multiple data presented in the cockpit apart from weather data and take multiple simultaneous actions. This paper proposes a novel method for representation of the weather data with minimal data size for storing and sharing it through connected weather services at reduced cost. It also proposes an automated weather threat assessment and advisory system based on this weather data. The proposed concepts are validated through simulation and the results are presented. The feasibility and challenges associated with the implementation of the proposed concept is discussed. Areas for future research are identified for maturing and implementing the technology.