Reconstructing Aircraft Turn Manoeuvres for Trajectory Analyses Using ADS-B Data

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data has become one of the most popular sources of data for trajectory-based ATM studies. It is can be received in most of the world without restrictions. Extended coverage can be achieved with a network of low-cost receivers and satellites. However, the fact that ADS-B is designed to contain only a low number of aircraft states such as position and velocity poses a challenge for some trajectory-based studies, for example, using ADS-B data to study aircraft turns. To this extent, air traffic controllers commonly rely on Mode-S track and turn reports to gather additional information like bank angle and turn rates during turns. Unlike ADS-B, this data has a low update rate and is not always openly available for all researchers. In this paper, we propose methods that allow researchers to extract and analyze aircraft turn parameters from ADS-B data during offline flight analysis. The paper first discusses the dynamics of aircraft turns. Then, based on ADS-B trajectory data, several steps are designed to derive turn radius, bank angle, and turn rate of an aircraft. The estimation results are validated with aircraft track and turn reports from Mode S Enhanced Surveillance. The median errors for bank angle and turn rate are found to be less than 2 degrees and 0.1 degrees/s respectively, which reflects the accuracy of the estimation approach.