Projects

SAFAR will focus on the development of a future avionics architecture for small aircraft providing easy and safe control of the aircraft. SAFAR aims at a significant reduction of pilot workload and an increase of safety during all phases of flight and ground operations incl. take-off and landing. In order to achieve this, SAFAR will provide the aircraft with easy handling characteristics and flight envelope protection at any time. The pilot flies the aircraft mainly via a stick controller and throttle lever. Switching between flight control and flight guidance modes will be performed automatically by the system - transparent for the pilot. SAFAR shall also provide the capability to take full advantage of the results of SESAR. Advanced ATC and even ATM will be supported in a way of maximum on-board automatism. In long term four dimensional flight vectoring as a result of the on-board ATM/FM shall be executed automatically. In mid term, four dimensional flight vectoring is expected to come from ATC via ADS-B. After being checked by the pilot via display, SAFAR will provide the capability for automatic execution of the flight vectoring (flight trajectories) after engagement by the pilot. The clear objective of SAFAR is to keep the handling characteristics of the A/C for all modes of control, i.e. manual control, control via flight guidance and control via flight management in combination with ATC resp. ATM, as easy as possible. Additionally, growth potential for autonomous emergency flight procedures in cases of sudden pilot medical diseases resp. incapacitation or total loss of engine power will be provided. Base for the implementation of SAFAR functions will be an advanced safety-critical, fault-tolerant fly-by-wire platform applicable to small aircraft. The platform will comprise computing resources, a human machine interface, a mainly satellite-based fault-tolerant attitude/navigation system and a safety-critical electric power supply with all-electric actuators.