A trajectory is, at its core, a record of where an aircraft was, when it was there, and how it was moving, a sequence of positions and kinematic states unfolding over time. For conventional aircraft operating along well-established routes, this is a well-studied problem. For VCA, it is not. Operational data is scarce, procedures are still being defined, and the flight envelope of these vehicles sits somewhere between a helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft, making it difficult to rely on existing models directly.
The approach adopted in VITOLMINS is to build from what is available, large volumes of ADS-B data for conventional aircraft and helicopters, and progressively adapt the methods toward VCA operations as data and understanding mature. The modelling work is structured around two complementary philosophies: model-based approaches, which encode known physics and performance constraints, and data-based approaches, which learn directly from observed flight data.