Risk-aware Emergency Landing Planning for Gliding Aircraft Model in Urban Environments

An in-flight loss of thrust poses a risk to the aircraft, its passengers, and people on the ground. When a loss of thrust happens, the (auto)pilot is forced to perform an emergency landing, possibly toward one of the reachable airports. If none of the airports is reachable, the aircraft is forced to land at another location, which can be risky in urban environments. In this work, we present a generalization of the previous work on planning safe emergency landing in the case of in-flight loss of thrust such that the risk induced by the loss of thrust can be assessed if none of the airports are reachable. The proposed method relies on planning space discretization and efficient risk propagation through the risk map. The approach can find the least risky landing site and corresponding forced landing trajectory for any configuration in the planning space. The method has been empirically evaluated in a realistic urban scenario. The results support its suitability for risk-aware planning of an emergency landing in the case of in-flight loss of thrust.