In civil aviation flight path planning, in order to effectively reduce the safety threat caused by the volcanic ash area to the civil aviation flight, factors such as the speed and acceleration of the aircraft in the volcanic ash area must be considered. In this paper, we propose an improved A-star algorithm by adopting the concept of potential collision set and using the velocity vector idea of optimal reciprocal collision avoidance (ORCA). The improved A-star algorithm selects the optimal speed range of the aircraft from the limited elements, obtains the speed and acceleration set of the aircraft in the volcanic ash area, calculates the flight path through the displacement increment, continuously refreshes the global starting point to the target point, and finally obtains the final path planning results by calculating the total cost value. The improved A-star algorithm is used to plan two flight paths from Madrid to Cairo and Algiers to Rome in volcanic ash areas. The verification results show that the improved A-star algorithm optimizes the flight path planning in the volcanic ash area and has the advantages of less search nodes, a small search range, and short computing time.

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