AVTECH says their new cruise optimizing tool continually calculates the best cruising altitude on a single aircraft’s trajectory, using “a unique and highly precise 10K weather forecast.“
Cruise optimization services are only as good as the quality of the weather data input – good data in, good data out, and vice versa. AVTECH says they have unique API access to the best aviation weather forecast in the world, 10K weather forecast by the UK Met Office, one of two global aviation weather providers along with NOAA in the US.
“The normal standard aviation forecast used by the aviation service community has a global resolution of 140 km horizontally”, says David Rytter, chief technical officer at AVTECH. “Internally, however, the Met Office runs a weather forecast at a much higher resolution of 10 km. Much of this useful information is thrown away when the forecast is downscaled to standard resolution.”
The 10K data from the Met Office in combination with AVTECH’s advanced algorithms and computing power results in a 4-dimensional trajectory (latitude, longitude, altitude and time) divided into cubes of only 10 km horizontally, which reduces up to 50% of the normal wind forecast error.
“Our service gives 200 times higher horizontal resolution and two times higher vertical resolution compared with the standard weather,” Rytter says. “That is how we can find the optimal levels to fly at different stages during an individual flight. This is possible thanks to the dynamic programming algorithm we have developed on top of the Met Offices high-definition weather data.”