Vision-augmented automatic landing of a general aviation fly-by-wire demonstrator

The infrastructure of instrument landing systems or ground-based augmentation for global navigation satellite systems is often not available at smaller private and general-aviation airfields. This restricts operation there to less accurate approach procedures with lower integrity. Yet, advanced flight guidance and control technology becomes available to smaller aircraft, which promises safety improvements and facilitates increased automation. In this context, a novel vision-augmented automatic landing system for general aviation aircraft has been developed within the German-national funded research project ‘C2Land.’ The system is independent of ground infrastructure and facilitates fully-automatic approach and landing with high accuracy and a high-integrity self-monitoring capability. In this paper, the integration of the prototype of the vision-augmented navigation system into the general aviation fly-by-wire demonstrator aircraft OE-FSD is presented, a highly modified Diamond Aircraft DA42 MNG. The concept for testing and validation of vision-aided automatic landing are discussed and results of simulation, system integration, and flight testing are shown and the capabilities of the C2Land system are demonstrated.