Aircraft cruise altitude and speed profile optimization in a real atmosphere

This paper considers subsonic turbojet aircraft fuel consumption minimization problem during cruise phase, assuming fixed time of arrival. The problem takes into account real atmosphere data. We utilize tailwind/headwind component values at various flight levels, as well as air temperatures and atmospheric pressures at various altitudes. The solution to the altitude and speed flight profile optimization problem is through constrained coordinate descent method. The paper considers optimizing the fuel consumption of a medium-haul aircraft during the cruise phase using sample data set on temperature, pressure, and wind speed. The proposed approach achieves a decrease in fuel consumption of 1.2% when optimizing with regard to real atmosphere.