Landing is a critical phase of flight, where an accurate knowledge of the aircraft's position
relative to the destination runway is required. During flights conducted under Visual Flight
Rules, the flight crew maintains continuous visual contact with the runway to conduct a safe
landing. When visibility is degraded and external visual cues are not available, the flight is
conducted under Instrument Flight Rules, and the flight crew is reliant on the radio navigation
Instrument Landing System to guide the aircraft to the runway. However, such systems require
expensive on-board and ground-based infrastructure, which is usually not available at smaller
airfields typically used for general aviation. In order to fill this gap, the objective of the C2Land
project is to develop an on-board navigation system independent of ground-based infrastructure
to enable automatic landings for general aviation aircraft. The navigation system is augmented
with visible-light and infrared cameras, which detect the runway in Visual Meteorological
Conditions as well as Instrument Meteorological Conditions. After testing the navigation
system in a Hardware-in-the-Loop environment, it is integrated in the DA42-based research
aircraft OE-FSD. Flight tests are conducted and the performance of the navigation solution is
compared to a commercial-off-the-shelf inertial navigation system. Finally, the usability of the
new navigation system is demonstrated by automatic landings of the research aircraft.
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Landing is a critical phase of flight, where an accurate knowledge of the aircraft's position
relative to the destination runway is required. During flights conducted under Visual Flight
Rules, the flight crew maintains continuous visual contact with the runway to conduct a safe
landing. When visibility is degraded and external visual cues are not available, the flight is
conducted under Instrument Flight Rules, and the flight crew is reliant on the radio navigation
Instrument Landing Syste...
»