Analysis of Errors in Elevation at Low Level Flight by Using Digital Elevation Model (DEM)

Abstract

At low-level flight the risk of collision with the terrain increases, due to the importance of it in civilian and military field evenly, the random error for elevation needs to be analyzed; this error is resulting from errors in determining the location of navigation systems. Then the average elevation and error value in elevation of terrain must be found for the current location of the aircraft. Then by knowing these values, it can be possible to create a safe path for low-level flight to avoid the dangers of collision with terrain. But some problems were faced in navigation systems used in aircraft, the navigation systems have random errors in determining the location of aircraft, this error causes errors in determining the safe flight path. To solve this problem, the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) used to find the terrain elevation of the location provided by the navigation system, (which considered as the average of terrain elevations). Then the terrain elevation had been analyzed by statistical operations to get the average elevation and error value of terrain, then added the terrain elevation and the error of elevation to the minimum safe altitude to get the desired flight path. This is done by MATLAB software. When the results obtained from MATLAB was represented, and the curve was obtained which illustrates the elevation of terrain and a safe flight path over the terrain. During the project some references were not available which led to delay the steps of the project. Hence it's proposed to provide the sufficient references for the next projects to become