US 4,642,775 AGranted

Airborne flight planning and information system

AssigneeSundstrand Data Control, Inc.

InventorsJ. Douglas Cline, James A. Wilson, Stanley H. Feher, George D. Ward

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Abstract

A flight planning system for obtaining flight plans and/or weather information is provided with a portable computer having a display unit, keyboard, memory, built in modem and a built in disk drive that can be connected via telephone lines to a ground based data center. The basic flight planning data and/or weather request data is input in response to menu driven prompts and reviewed on the display by the pilot. The portable computer is then connected to the data center which generates a series of optimized flight plans and provides desired weather information. After the desired flight plan and/or weather information has been selected by the pilot, it is loaded onto a floppy disk in the disk drive. The aircraft is provided with a data transfer unit which accepts the floppy disk and downloads the flight plan and requested weather information into the onboard computerized navigation system. In addition the aircraft is provided with a VHF radio system for inflight communication with the data center so that the flight plan and/or weather information can be updated.

Claims40

Dependent claims

A flight planning system for use with an aircraft having a computerized navigation system comprising:

a data center at a first site that is remotely located from said aircraft includes a database storing navigation route information, performance characteristics for the aircraft and weather data, along with processing means responsive to flight plan input information for generating flight plans from said database, said processor of said data center being accessible by means of a data communications link for transmitting said flight plan input information to said data center from a second site remote from both said aircraft and said data center and for transmitting said flight plans to said second remote site;
a portable computer for use at a location remote from said aircraft, said portable computer having a processor, a memory, data input means for pemitting an operator to input flight planning data, display means for displaying data to an operator and data recording means for recording one or more flight plans on a storage medium;
data communications means for selectively establishing a data communication link between said portable computer and said data center;
a data transfer unit secured within the aircraft including means for receiving and reading said storage medium and reading said one or more flight plans recorded on said storage medium;
and
a data management unit connected to said data transfer unit and the computerized navigation system;
said data management unit including means for transferring said one or more flight plans from said data transfer unit to said computerized navigation system.

4 more elements

A method of providing a flight plan for an aircraft navigation system comprising the steps of:

(a) tramsmitting a signal representative of required flight plan input information to a computer based data center having a data base that includes at least weather and navigation data;
(b) generating within said computer based data center a proposed flight plan that is based on said signal representative of said required flight plan input information and weather and navigation data that is included in said data base;
(c) transmitting from said computer based data center to the source of said signal representative of said required flight plan input information a proposed flight plan;
(d) recording on a recording medium signals representative of said proposed flight plan received from said computer based data center;
(e) transporting the recording medium that contains said data representative of said proposed flight plan to an aircraft that is equipped with said aircraft navigation system;
and
(g) generating at said aircraft a flight plan signal from said recording medium that includes said data representative of said proposed flight plan.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.