Automated Flight Planning Service Using Historical Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current flight planning processes are inefficient and burdensome, requiring extensive calculations for optimal routes and fuel management, often relying on outdated information and lacking real-time weather and aircraft performance data, leading to suboptimal flight plans.
Innovation Solution
A web-based flight planning service that calculates optimized routes using aircraft performance data, current or forecast aviation weather, and historical flight plans, allowing users to specify departure and arrival airports and aircraft type, and integrates fuel purchasing options with affiliated fixed base operators, providing discounted fuel prices.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If traditional flight planning methods are used, then pilots can manually calculate routes and fuel requirements, but the process becomes time-consuming and produces suboptimal flight plans due to lack of real-time data
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces manual mechanical calculations with an automated computer system that uses algorithms to process flight planning. The system automatically calculates optimal routes, fuel requirements, and timing based on input parameters, eliminating time-consuming manual computations while maintaining high accuracy through computational precision.
Solution Approach 2:
The system incorporates feedback mechanisms by continuously accessing real-time data from multiple sources (weather services, air traffic information, aircraft performance databases) and adjusting flight plan calculations accordingly. This iterative feedback loop ensures both speed and accuracy by updating plans based on current conditions.
2Measurement precision
If comprehensive real-time data is integrated into flight planning, then flight plan accuracy improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary software layer that acts as a mediator between the user and complex data sources. This intermediary system handles the complexity of data integration, formatting, and processing, presenting simplified results to the user while managing the underlying complexity of connecting to multiple data sources and processing algorithms.
3Productivity
If multiple calculations are performed to optimize flight plans, then flight efficiency improves, but the time required for planning increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary calculations and pre-processes data before final flight plan generation. By pre-calculating various route options, fuel consumption scenarios, and timing parameters in advance, the system can quickly generate optimized plans without requiring extensive real-time calculations, thus reducing planning time while maintaining efficiency.
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented system and method for the processing and optimization of flight plans is disclosed. Information regarding a plurality of previous flight plans is received over a digital network and is stored in at least a database. The database preferably includes aviation fuel price information, aircraft performance information, and aviation weather information as well. Upon receiving a request, a server generates at least an optimized portion of a flight plan. In one form, historical flight plan data of others is automatically used to aid in the determination of the optimized route offered to the user for review, with the resulting final flight plan being electronically filed with the FAA upon approval. In a further form, the user may arrange fuel transactions at intermediate destinations with the service provider receiving a fee in exchange for facilitating the transaction.