Patent ID: 7433779

Claim:
A method of following the course of a flight plan of a cooperative aircraft provided with a flight management computer linked by a data transmission link to a control authority comprising the steps of: the flight plan being known to the control authority and including of a chaining of waypoints associated with local flight constraints defining a trajectory skeleton to be followed and a travel schedule to be complied with, the control authority employing the flight plan to estimate the instantaneous position of the aircraft, the flight management computer constructing, on the basis of the trajectory skeleton and of the travel schedule that are specified in the flight plan, an effective trajectory with softened lateral and vertical transitions, dimensioned so as to take account of the maneuvering capabilities of the aircraft and of a comfort instruction, and tagged by means of pseudo-waypoints associated with local flight constraints, the position of a pseudo-waypoint marking the start of a transition and the associated local flight constraints defining the properties of the transition, said method being characterized in that the flight management computer of the aircraft calculates the locations of the projections of the pseudo-waypoints onto the trajectory skeleton specified in the flight plan and communicates them via the data transmission link to the control authority which uses them to improve its estimate of the instantaneous position of the aircraft.