Patent ID: 8489261

Claim:
A method for aiding the piloting of an aircraft during an approach final phase for a landing at an airport, the approach final phase being implemented according to one of a plurality of different approaches, each approach defining a decision height, the method comprising, the following steps carried out by a flight management system on the aircraft and devices connected to the flight management system: allowing a crew member to select a landing way of the airport that will be used during the landing; extracting the possible approaches for the selected landing way from a database, the extracted possible approaches including predetermined characteristics for the possible approaches, including the decision height defined by each of the possible approaches; automatically selecting an approach for the landing on the selected landing way, wherein the automatically selected approach is selected from amongst the number of possible approaches for the selected landing way, wherein the selected approach (i) presents the lowest decision height of possible approaches; and (ii) is technically capable of being implemented by the aircraft, wherein the determining of whether a selected approach is technically capable of being implemented further includes checking if a detection device likely to detect signals that have to be used during the selected approach is available on board the aircraft, and checking if this detection device is suitably detecting the signals; and using the automatically selected approach to activate an approach which will effectively be implemented by the aircraft.