Boeing teams test auto airplane taxiing

A single-engine Cessna taxied back and forth on a runway earlier this year, but the pilots on the flight deck were largely hands off the controls. Instead, Boeing engineers sent digital commands from a nearby trailer.

The demonstrations at a NASA facility in California are part of a multi-year Boeing effort to make airplane handling safer and more efficient at airports. Today, ground operations – including the taxi phase of a flight – account for more than 10 percent of commercial airplane fatalities.

• “Testing like this takes years and multiple iterations as we learn, refine and repeat,” said Capt. John Parker, who piloted the test conditions. “We’re putting in the work to continue moving these development technologies forward because safer operations are important to us.”

Boeing Test & Evaluation conducted the demonstrations in partnership with NASA, testing two technologies created by Boeing’s Product Development team.

• Digital taxi weaves together information from airplanes, ground vehicles and airspace controls and provides one set of taxing instructions in the form of text and graphics such as maps. Currently, air traffic control only sends verbal instructions to flight crews, which can sometimes be unclear or misunderstood.
• Auto taxi takes the inputs from “digital taxi” and adds information from sensors and advanced systems to steer the airplane from the gate to the runway. Like the autopilot function during a flight, pilots would constantly monitor the airplane’s performance and the surrounding environment.

Simulating a real airport: To test the technologies, the team digitally re-created normal airport activity – instead of the pristine conditions at the NASA facility.

Then, Boeing engineers in a trailer transcribed taxing instructions from Air Traffic Control and routed them into the digital taxi system – simulating what would happen if ATC were digitally enabled.

The instructions are sent to Boeing’s specially outfitted Cessna Caravan on the runway. Inside, Parker with Flight Test Director Jordan Stringfield and two Boeing engineers accepted and confirmed the incoming instructions. Then, they manually executed digital taxi instructions or enabled auto taxi to complete the taxing maneuver based on digital taxi input.

• “Ground operations safety is a major focus for our team,” said Michael Klein, chief engineer of Surrogate Operations in BCA Product Development, who coordinated the testing. “We see these first tests as a stepping stone to testing in a more realistic and complex airport environment as we mature these technologies.”

The Boeing Flight Operations Multimedia team captured photos and video of the taxi tests to document the test for future evaluation. 

What’s next: Boeing’s Autonomy Systems Team is analyzing the test data and footage to determine if all aspects of the technologies worked as designed. Boeing will incorporate the learnings into future versions of the software and conduct additional lab testing and field demonstrations. Testing on a commercial jetliner may be planned in the future.