The problem of ensuring an emergency landing of an unmanned helicopter (UH) flying in
a certain area of the target application is considered. A two-stage algorithm for searching for a suitable
landing pad, taking into account the set of requirements, is proposed. At the first stage, using a digital
elevation map (DEM) placed onboard a UH, a route around areas potentially suitable for landing in
terms of the surface topography is calculated. The route is formed by sequentially solving static opti-
mization problems in order to minimize the average losses that occur when a UH flies from one an
landing pad to another. At the second stage, which is implemented directly during the movement of a
UH along the calculated route, the final selection of the landing site is made based on the processing
of ground penetrating radar data to confirm the soil density requirements at the landing site. A neural
network classifier based on a two-layer perceptron is used to assess the suitability of the landing site in
terms of the soil density requirement. An example that illustrates the operation of the proposed algo-
rithm both under the conditions of a computational experiment and during a series of flight experi-
ments is considered.