The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech Forum has been a major conference for presenting aerospace research and innovation for the last 50 years. The 2020 AIAA SciTech Forum brought together experts from across the globe to share ideas on a variety of technical disciplines and explore the aerospace industry’s contributions to a sustainable future.
The forum witnessed over 5,000 participants from across the globe representing governments, academic institutions, and private institutions and over 2,500 technical presentations.
University of Malta PhD Student, Mr Sameer Kumar Jasra presented his research at the AIAA SciTech Forum. Mr Sameer presented a paper titled “Evaluation of Flight Parameters During Approach and Landing Phases by Applying Principal Component Analysis”. This paper adopts an unsupervised learning technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze flight data. While the flight parameters for a stable approach have been established for a while through experience, the paper re-evaluates these flight parameters using existing data and PCA for a set of airports across the United States of America. Certain flight parameters were found to be more sensitive to some airports.
The parameters have been cross-checked with experts in the industry to better interpret their significance. Identification of such parameters will help to improve in landings. The presentation was attended by academics and industrial experts from industries like Boeing as well as NASA. The conference was complemented by a visit to the NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, where Sameer was able witness a shuttle launch and interacting with astronaut Mr. Thomas David Jones who completed four shuttle flights to space before retiring in 2001.
Smart FDM is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme. The project is led by the Institute of Aerospace Technologies and our industrial partner QuAero Ltd.