Aircraft Design for Safety in Emergency Landing

Abstract

Yuri Spirochkin

This article addresses the problem safety in emergency landing of an aircraft belonging to the category of transport airplanes. Emergency landing poses a significant challenge to the designers of such aircraft. In this case, the safety requirements aimed at avoiding serious injury to occupants (passengers and crew members) are combined with the uncertainty of the loads acting on impact with the landing surface and the behavior of the aircraft structure, the elements of which are destroyed during the impact. The provisions of airworthiness standards and existing design approaches mainly assume the conditions of a “soft” emergency landing (called a “minor crash landing”, corresponding to minor damage and injury), while in other possible scenarios the chances of survival of occupants are not guaranteed, and there is a safety deficit. To improve safety in this situation, a new aircraft design concept is proposed – Smart, Pro-Active, Resilient System (SPARS). It is applicable to the creation of various complex, safety-critical and expensive technical systems, the operation of which may involve extreme manifestations of uncertainty that exceed the design limits. The SPARS concept combines defense in depth against predictable hazards, in-service monitoring and diagnostics of anomalies with the ideas of a biologically similar (bionic) response of the system to adverse events, including unexpected ones, and giving it the ability to recover from destructive impacts. This article illustrates the SPARS concept using a hypothetical example of emergency landing of the Soviet aerospace vehicle 'Buran', similar to the American 'Space Shuttle'. However, the provisions presented are also applicable to conventional aircraft, including civil airplanes.

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