PhD Position: Air traffic safety low-emission aircraft

Battery, hydrogen and other new aircraft types will fly at different speeds, climb rates and ranges from today's jets. This project asks what happens to safety, capacity and efficiency when such aircraft share airspace with conventional traffic. Will build metrics and models to measure the effect of a mixed fleet, using large-scale simulation, semi-analytical models or both. A practical part of the work is extending the open-source Blue Sky air traffic simulator into a scenario generator and assessment tool that other researchers and policymakers can use.

Will also look at what a mixed fleet means for procedure design, separation, trajectory prediction and collision avoidance. The post sits inside a national lab of twelve PhD candidates and three postdocs run by TU Delft and the Dutch Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), working with the Dutch infrastructure ministry.

Eligibility: MSc (M.Tech/ME/M.Sc) in Aerospace or Aeronautical Engineering, or an MSc in Mechanical Engineering, (Applied) Mathematics or Computer Science with an interest in aviation and air traffic management. Strong physics, maths and Python coding expected. A

B.Tech alone is not listed as sufficient.

Tests: Strong English communication;
English proficiency per TU Delft Graduate School admission requirements

Pay: EUR 3,204 - 4,051 gross per month (year 1 to year
4), plus 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus

Duration: 4 years (1.5-year contract plus 2.5-year contract after go/no-go review)