Patent ID: 8090526

Claim:
A method for determining the horizontal profile of an aircraft flight plan route leading from a departure point to a destination point, complying with vertical flight and speed profiles prescribed on departure and/or on arrival and taking account of the relief and of regulated overfly zones, said method implemented by an onboard device and comprising the following steps: creating two curvilinear distance maps covering a maneuver zone containing the departure point and destination point and including one and the same set of obstacles to be circumnavigated taking into account the relief, the regulated overfly zones and the vertical flight and speed profiles prescribed on departure and/or on arrival, the first having the departure point as the origin of the distance measurements and the second, the destination point as the origin of the distance measurements, creating, a third curvilinear distance map by summation, for each of its points, of the curvilinear distances that are assigned to them in the first and second curvilinear distance maps, charting, in the third curvilinear distance map, a connected set of iso-distance points forming a sequence of parallelograms and/or of points linking the departure point and destination point, selecting, from the charted connected set of iso-distance points, a series of consecutive points going from the departure point to the destination point via diagonals of its parallelograms, the series being called direct path, approximating the series of points of the direct path by a sequence of straight segments complying with an arbitrary maximum deviation threshold relative to the points of the series and an arbitrary minimum lateral deviation threshold relative to the set of obstacles to be circumnavigated, and choosing points of the intermediate junctions of the straight segments as check-points or turn points in the flight plan.