Development of an Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System for a General Aviation Aircraft

This contribution presents the design of an Auto-GCAS algorithm for fixed-wing General Aviation aircraft. The design is implemented for a Diamond Aircraft DA-42NG Twin Star twin-engine piston aircraft along with its integration in a simulation environment. The algorithm has been adapted to account for the technical and operational differences between classes of aircraft. The overall functional architecture comprising trajectory prediction, scan area definition, terrain database query, activation/deactivation logic, and an inner loop autopilot is shared with previous designs. The avoidance maneuvers are re-designed to ensure maximum climb performance by trading airspeed for altitude. The freely available ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model is used as the terrain database. The integration in a Flight Training Device allows for both automated and manual piloted testing and verification of the algorithm.