Patent ID: 8121746

Claim:
A method for monitoring the minimum flying altitude of an aircraft, comprising: calculating on processor a vertical flight profile describing the changing altitude of the aircraft during an arbitrary period taking into account its instantaneous speed (V) and its instantaneous angle of climb or descent; a phase for calculating a minimum vertical flight profile describing the changing minimum flying altitude over the future route of the aircraft during the period taking into account its instantaneous heading and its instantaneous speed, the minimum altitude values being determined for a coverage of the route of the aircraft during the period; and a phase for generating a warning message based on the relative position of the vertical flight profile compared with the minimum vertical flight profile, wherein the coverage of the route is provided by disks centered on points on the route, the radii of the disks ensuring that any point within the width of the route is contained in at least one disk, requests to a database including airspace zones returning the zones intersected by each of the disks, each zone corresponding to a minimum flying altitude, the minimum altitude retained in a disk being the maximum value of the minimum altitudes for each type of zone returned, the requests to the database return only the airspace zones having an operational interest relative to the heading followed by the aircraft with a tolerance about this heading, and the requests to the database return air route segments, each segment corresponding to a minimum flying altitude in the outbound direction, to a minimum flying altitude in the return direction and to a segment width, a segment being returned only if it is oriented along the heading followed by the aircraft with a tolerance about this heading and if it fully contains the disk concerned, the minimum altitude retained for this type of zone in the disk concerned being the lowest of the minimum altitudes of the segments returned.