What is Flight Management System (FMS)?

A Flight Management System is also known by different names such as flight control system, flight management visual display, flight display computer, FMS and control display unit. A flight management system is very important component of a modern aircraft’s avionics. A Flight Management System is a specialized digital computer system that helps the pilot to automate wide variety of flight tasks and helps to reduce the workload of flight crew. In modern civilian aircraft FMS helps a lot as there is no need to carry flight engineers or navigators. 

A very first task or primary function of FMS is management of the flight plan stored in its database. To determine the aircraft's position FMS can guide the aircraft along the flight plan with the use of technology such as sensors like INS and GPS. Cockpit is a place where FMS is placed and from the cockpit FMS is normally controlled with the use of Control Display Unit which consists of a keyboard, small screen and a touch screen. After flight management of the flight plan FMS sends the flight plan to the Multifunction Display, Navigation Display and Electronic Flight Instrument System so that it can be displayed.

Characteristics of Flight Management System:

(1) Navigation database

All Flight Management Systems consists of a navigation database to store important information required for building a flight plan. 

The Navigation Database consists of following information.

• Holding patterns.
• Way points or intersections.
• Airways.
• Airports.        
• Radio navigation aids which consists of distance measuring equipment, instrument landing systems, VHF omnidirectional range and non directional beacons.
• Runways.
• Standard instrument departure.
• Instrument approach procedure.
• Standard terminal arrival.

(2) Flight Plan

The flight plan is a route by which the aircraft is going to travel and it is generally determined on the ground before the departure of the flight either by the pilot for smaller aircrafts or by a professional dispatcher for the commercial or cargo aircraft's. 

(3) Position Determination

Once you are in flight a most important task of the FMS is to determine the aircraft's position and about the accuracy of that position. Simple Flight Management System uses a single sensor or generally GPS in order to determine position but in modern FMS they are using many sensors as much as they can.

(4) Guidance

Once the flight plan and the aircraft's position are given or set in FMS, the FMS calculates the course or path to follow. The pilot can follow this path manually or he can set the mode as autopilot to follow the course.

(5) VNAV

VNAV stands for Vertical Navigation Many sophisticated aircrafts generally airliners such as the Boeing 737, Airbus A318 and larger have full performance Vertical Navigation. The work of VNAV is to predict and optimize the vertical path. 

Market Report:

The Flight Management Systems Market size is expected to be $1.8 billion by 2018. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3% during the period of 2013 to 2018. US will be the fastest growing region.

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