Analysis of Virtual Sensors for Predicting Aircraft Fuel Consumption

This paper gives a brief overview of the modeling approach and describes efforts to validate and analyze the initial results of this project. We examine the typical error in modeling, and compare modeling accuracy against both complex and simplistic regression approaches. We also estimate a ranking of the importance of each FOQA variable used as input, and demonstrate that FOQA variables can reliably be used to identify different modes of fuel consumption, which may be useful in future work.

Analysis indicates that fuel consumption is accurately predicted while remaining theoretically sensitive to sub-nominal pilot inputs and maintenance-related issues.