Photo: uAvionix

uAvionix has integrated its FlightLine surveillance services with Volant Autonomy’s integrated traffic management (ITM) system for Agile and Integrated Airspace System (ALIAS), a UK Government Future Flight Phase III project.

The collaboration, showcased in the Channel Islands and New Jersey Airport, aims to advance the integration of unsegregated crewed and uncrewed operations into the UK airspace system and support beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations for uncrewed aerial systems (UAS).

Following the completion of Project ALIAS in June 2024, Volant Autonomy has seen a surge in interest in its BVLOS-enabling technology. uAvionix’s FlightLine system proved to be an asset in supporting the consortium’s demonstration flights, according to Anthony Lawrenson, COO of Volant Autonomy.

The integration delivers timely and reliable automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) positional data, which forms an important part of the ALIAS traffic information service (TIS). It is crucial to obtain and use accurate positional data joint with primary and secondary radar feeds from ports of Jersey (ATC) to operate Volant’s DAA solution. This solution complies with the RTCA’s ACAS sXu (Aircraft Collision Avoidance System) standards.

During the latest ALIAS trials, the Diamond DA-42 aircraft operated by Draken provided safe and dynamic separation from UAVs operated by SkyLift and SkyPorts. The trials also showcased SkyLift’s unmanned aircraft operating in and out of test sites, demonstrating the realistic potential for multiple airborne services to operate safely within a live Air Traffic Control (ATC) environment.

<p>The post uAvionix, Volant Autonomy advance air traffic management system first appeared on GPS World.</p>

Photo: Iris Automation

Iris Automation has announced the commercial availability of Casia G, a ground-based version of its detect-and-avoid surveillance solution.

Using the same patented artificial intelligence (AI) and computer-vision technology as Iris Automation’s onboard solutions, Casia G provides 360° optical detection with alerts. It enables operators to avoid both cooperative and non-cooperative aircraft for safe beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) flight.

Casia G creates a perimeter of monitored airspace for UAVs to perform work safely, without additional payload. It’s suitable for operations in fixed or temporary locations, supporting drone-in-the-box operations and augmenting or replacing human visual observers. BVLOS flight for unmanned systems has been challenging due to right of way concerns, specifically the inability for unmanned aircraft to successfully see and avoid other aircraft.

“A human has sufficient visual acuity to see airborne traffic only within a +/-5 degree field of view around our focal point. We have to scan the sky, and are frankly not very good at it,” said Jon Damush, CEO, Iris Automation. “Casia G sees the entire sky, with uniform probability and resolution, 10 times per second — without distractions or breaks. This  solution for airspace awareness covers a large majority of small UAS use cases, but at a price point that is economically viable and without complex integration.”

Casia G can be expanded by adding additional units in a mesh to create a network of detection nodes for large-area air risk mitigation. The system then provides a single feed of cooperative and non-cooperative air traffic, available to an operator’s traffic management system. This provides a path to approvals for both larger area and one-to-many operations by enabling a holistic view of the airspace, the company said.

Casia G has already obtained a BVLOS waiver on behalf of the City of Reno. Iris Automation is in the process of proving additional deployment patterns and concepts of operation with the FAA.

<p>The post Iris Automation launches ground-based surveillance system for UAVs first appeared on GPS World.</p>

The satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS) gives additional precision to U.S. GPS signals, delivering an average precision of 1.5 meters over European territory, as much as a 10-fold improvement over unaugmented signals. EGNOS also provides confirmation of GPS signal integrity through additional messaging identifying any residual errors.

While the EGNOS Open Service has been in general operation since 2009, EGNOS began its safety-of-life service in March 2011.

The European Space Agency (ESA) designed EGNOS as the European equivalent of the U.S. Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), working closely with the European air traffic management agency Eurocontrol. ESA then passed EGNOS to the European GNSS Agency (GSA) to run operationally.

Guiding airliners

EGNOS’s primary customer is aircraft. Without guidance from the ground, pilots using EGNOS can confidently descend in bad weather to 60 meters’ altitude before needing to make visual contact with the tarmac.

On March 17, 2011, France’s Pau Pyrénées Airport was the first airport to use EGNOS. Today, more than 385 airports and helipads and 60 airlines across Europe use EGNOS-based LPV-200 approaches (short for Localizer Performance with Vertical guidance – 200 feet). The EGNOS service requires no ground equipment, and replaces the radio guidance beamed upward by traditional CAT I instrument landing system (ILS) infrastructure with no decrease in performance.

As of March 2021, more than 385 airports and helipads and 60 airlines across Europe are using EGNOS-based LPV-200 approaches. (Image: ESA)

Serving drones

EGNOS is now being eyed as the enabler of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The GSA has supported numerous trials of drones equipped with EGNOS as well as Galileo through its EGNSS4RPAS project. Crewed aircraft are expected to be vastly outnumbered in our skies by all kinds of UAVs, employed for everything from weather and environmental monitoring to personalized delivery services.

U-Space is Europe’s program to integrate drones into the airspace. (Image: ESA)

The traditional person-based air traffic control model will need to evolve to accommodate such a shift, based on automated monitoring, traffic management and collision avoidance. In Europe, this highly automated version of air traffic control is termed U-space.

EGNOS’s safety-of-life service is essential to making this happen, moving from today’s situation — where drones are limited to specific air corridors and line-of-sight operations — to let them roam freely but safely in busy airspace and built-up areas.

“The whole idea behind EGNOS’s safety-of-life has been to render satellite navigation sufficiently reliable for any kind of use,” explained Didier Flament, who leads ESA’s EGNOS team. “After 10 years of faultless operations, new applications are becoming plain. Drone flight is one example. EGNOS is also being evaluated for train positioning as well as assisted and autonomous automobile driving.”

EGNOS, the next generation

ESA retains responsibility for the system’s evolution, and the middle of this decade should see the debut of its new generation, EGNOS v3.

“While the current system only works with single-frequency GPS signals, EGNOS v3 will operate on a multi-frequency, multi-constellation basis, able to augment all available satellite signals in both L1 and L5 bands, including Galileo,” Didier said. “The result will be far enhanced performance and reliability.

“In addition, we are working with developers of other SBAS around the globe to ensure they stay fully interoperable so for instance EGNOS-equipped aircraft can fly between continents on a seamless basis. Such interoperability, combined with the arrival of the other SBAS systems under development in other regions, will lead to a quasi-global worldwide safety-of-life service coverage in the year 2030.”

Operational and planned satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS) around the globe. (Image: ESA)

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Cover: SESAR JC

Drone technology takes center stage in a new European report on the continent’s air traffic management.

U-Space: Supporting Safe and Secure Drone Operations in Europe, is a 42-page preliminary summary of SESAR U-space research and innovation results, following 19 demonstrations that took place from 2017 through 2019.

The research and demonstration projects addressed topics such as drone operations; critical communications; surveillance and tracking; information management; aircraft systems; ground-based technologies; cyber-resilience; and geo-fencing.

“Drones are disrupting business as usual in air traffic management,” said Florian Guillermet, executive director, SESAR Joint Undertaking. “A simple adaptation of our current air traffic management system is not enough; accommodating these air vehicles in the numbers forecast requires a new approach.”

The projects map progress on development of the technological capabilities and all services
required for making U-space a reality, starting with foundation services (U1) before progressing to initial services (U2), advanced services (U3) and finally full services (U4).

Results of the projects summarized in the brochure will be fully detailed in a comprehensive report, expected to be published in the second half of 2020.

Chart: SESAR JC

SESAR 2020

SESAR 2020 is a European Union innovative program for researching the future of air traffic management in Europe. It builds on its predecessor, SESAR 1, to deliver high-performing operational and technological solutions for uptake by the aviation industry.

With a budget of 1.6 billion euros between now and 2024, SESAR 2020 will support projects to deliver solutions in these four key areas:

• airport operations
• network operations
• air traffic services
• technology enablers.

<p>The post Drone projects summarized in Europe air traffic management report first appeared on GPS World.</p>

Aircraft throughout Europe are guided by EUROCONTROL, which will have access to ADS-B data through Aireon. Here, a plane lands at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands. (Photo: Sjo/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images Plus)

Aireon and EUROCONTROL have signed a 10-year agreement to integrate space-based ADS-B data into their air traffic management processes across EUROCONTROL’S 41 Member States and two Comprehensive Agreement (CA) States.

The space-based automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) data will enhance aircraft management capabilities, contributing to improve predictability, capacity, environmental impact supporting sustainable growth throughout the European region.

It will also support other applications, such as crisis management, contingency management, environmental monitoring, performance monitoring and expanded datasets for post-analysis, traffic statistics and safety-related assessments.

Spanning 43 countries from Turkey to Ireland, Finland to Portugal, EUROCONTROL’s aircraft management states encompass over 11.5 million square kilometers of terrestrial airspace, as well as part of the airspace over the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Baltic.

Aireon data will be integrated into the EUROCONTROL’s enhanced tactical flow management system (ETFMS), which provides data to European aviation stakeholders, regardless of operational borders, in real time.

Space-based ADS-B data will enrich ETFMS’s complex traffic demand and slot allocation calculations, which currently rely on ground-based surveillance data and flight plan processing systems. As a result, Aireon’s data will support Europe’s primary flow management system to be more accurate in its trajectory predictions and unlock an otherwise unavailable operational capacity.

“With Aireon’s high-integrity, high-quality data, the EUROCONTROL network manager will have the ability to work with information from beyond the European airspace,” said Eamonn Brennan, director general, EUROCONTROL. “Full integration of Aireon space-based ADS-B data will allow us to be more accurate in our trajectory predictions and ensure higher levels of safety, predictability and efficiency in our flow management operations. This partnership is the latest development in our effort to ensure European airspace is one of the most dynamic and efficient in the world.”

EUROCONTROL. Having been nominated as the Network Manager by the European Commission until the end of 2029, EUROCONTROL is driving a coordinated and technologically advanced approach to the challenges faced by the European air traffic network.

Helping address the improvements that are needed in operations, cybersecurity, service provision, crisis management, airspace design, utilization and more, EUROCONTROL provides support and expertise to air navigation service providers (ANSPs), airlines, airports and military partners in the region to help make European aviation, safe, synchronized, efficient and environmentally friendly.

Aerion. In 2019, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certified Aireon as the first provider of aircraft surveillance-as-a-service. Additionally, Aireon has the only global, single-source dataset available to the industry.

For EUROCONTROL, this means that once the service is integrated into its systems, it will have unprecedented visibility into the full picture of aircraft arriving, departing and crossing over Europe over an area of six flight hours and 3,000 nautical miles around EUROCONTROL Member States.

“EUROCONTROL is a leader in air traffic flow management. They are the first customer to use Aireon data well beyond their own area of responsibility. This will enable them to maximize the effectiveness of their processes and procedures by including long-range arrivals and neighboring States into their capacity and demand measures,” said Don Thoma, CEO, Aireon. “EUROCONTROL recognizes the global value in connecting ANSPs through a common, high-fidelity, global data source that provides situational awareness of actual aircraft position information. We look forward to the benefits all EUROCONTROL customers will see in the near, medium and long-term.”

Aireon’s data will also be integrated in EUROCONTROL’s new system called iNM, which will implement incremental updates to all of EUROCONTROL’s operational systems and digital infrastructure in the course of this decade.

<p>The post ADS-B to improve air traffic in Europe first appeared on GPS World.</p>

The company has completed its involvement in the Gulf of Finland (GOF) U-Space project, declaring the trials to have been a “huge success” and an “amazing showcase” of its unmanned traffic management (UTM) technologies.

The GOF U-space demonstrations are funded by the SESAR Joint Undertaking for European sky air traffic management research.

In July and August, advanced drone operational demonstrations took place across Estonia and Finland, showcasing use cases that involved both manned and unmanned aircraft in shared airspace. The demonstrations relied on systems such as Altitude Angel’s GuardianUTM O/S to remain safe.

GuardianUTM, the company’s core system, is already helping drones operate in controlled airspace. It powers the UK’s national UTM system, operated by NATS, the UK’s main air navigation service provider.

Altitude Angel was a key UTM partner for the trials, providing services that included integration to the FIMS (flight information management system) for the transport of flight plans, telemetry/position reports, AIM (geofencing/volume reservations), as well as alerts and registration data to-and-from the drone operators and manned aviation which were involved in the trials.

Altitude Angel was able to demonstrate its UTM platform across a number of scenarios that varied in scope and range, and included:

• urban drone fleet operations with police intervention,
• long-distance multisensory inspection flights over forests,
• urban drone operations in controlled airspace,
• powerline inspection in rural areas, maritime search and rescue, and
• international parcel delivery.

The demonstration series concluded with an urban Volocopter air taxi flight around Vantaa International Airport, Helsinki.

“We’ve been working with the SESAR team for over a year on this project. It’s been a great few months in Finland and Estonia supporting the live demonstrations which have been huge success and an amazing showcase of our world-leading UTM technologies,” said Simon Wynn-Mackenzie, Altitude Angel’s head of products.

“Not only did the scenarios give us another opportunity to demonstrate our production UTM platform in another real-life environment, they went a long way to showing the public how drones can be used in a positive and socially beneficial way on a daily basis,” Wynn-Mackenzie said.

“Our only disappointment was that we were not able to demonstrate our world-first Conflict Resolution Service which we unveiled in July, as the trial scenarios had already been agreed. However, we’ll be looking to showcase our constantly evolving platform and several new services very soon,” he said.

Other UTM demonstrations. In November 2018, Altitude Angel led the team behind Operation Zenith, which gave a view of the future of air traffic management and drone integration into busy, complex airspace, demonstrating how by using the right technology, it’s possible to safely integrate unmanned traffic into controlled airspace and open the skies to commercial airspace worldwide.

Altitude Angel’s developer platform is open and available to all.

The U-space initiative. The GOF U-space project, with a broad consortium of 19 members, demonstrates Europe is on course with its implementation of U-space, an initiative that aims to ensure safe and secure drone traffic management, taking into account the rapid growth in the use of drones.

The GOF concept enables shared situational awareness for all aviation stakeholders. The success of the project is based on deep air traffic management experience of all consortium members, including three world-leading UTM technology vendors and two air navigation services providers, developing interoperability and data-sharing solutions that are aligned with SESAR’s overall U-space architecture.

The U-Space project has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Connection Europe Facility (CEF) programme under grant agreement SJU/LC/343-CTR.

<p>The post Altitude Angel demonstrates UAV traffic management in Europe first appeared on GPS World.</p>

Photo: iStock.com/valio 84sl, via FAA

Grand Sky Business and Aviation Park and Harris Corp. have joined forces to enable the country’s first and largest unmanned aerial system (UAS) airspace to support beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight operations and UAS Traffic Management (UTM) research.

Stretching up to 100 miles, this BVLOS “super corridor” is the most technologically sophisticated UAS airspace supported by multiple and redundant systems for cooperative and non-cooperative surveillance.

These surveillance capabilities make possible a wide range of UAS BVLOS applications in precision farming, oil and gas, infrastructure inspection, public safety, package deliveries, and others.

“Customers of Grand Sky will have access to a truly unique UAS operational capability, in addition to better facilities, comprehensive airspace surveillance, and wide operational areas,” Grand Sky Development Co. President Thomas Swoyer Jr., said. “We all benefit from efficient and safe BVLOS flight operations and a larger corridor with proven FAA collaboration and flight authorizations.”

The surveillance system combines data feeds from a network of advanced sensors and towers. Two long-range primary radars located at Grand Forks Air Force Base and at Hillsboro, North Dakota, provide detection of non-cooperative aircraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) secondary radars and ADS-B network in the region, as well as local Harris ADS-B Xtend sensors, add additional layers of visibility for cooperative aircrafts in the airspace.

Aviation-grade displays help pilots and electronic observers monitor the airspace environment over the BVLOS corridor and safely steer UAS from approaching manned aircraft.

The combination of best practices in aviation safety management, proven technologies and experience with BVLOS regulatory approvals will make it easy for users of the airspace to advance UAS technology commercialization and routine, efficient flight operations.

UAS operators can work with Grand Sky and Harris to develop, test, and refine a variety of complex BVLOS concepts of operations and secure waivers from the FAA for large-scale use.

A full range of UAS operations can be supported for all types and sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles along the BVLOS corridor including a variety of airspace classes and execution of diverse defense, civil and commercial applications.

“This is another first for Grand Sky and North Dakota in leading the UAS Industry,” Harris Vice President and General Manager of Commercial UAS Solutions George Kirov said. “The size and complexity of the airspace opened to UAS BVLOS operations is unmatched in the UAS industry. The sophistication of the Harris BVLOS system at Grand Sky is also unprecedented — linking Harris’ most advanced suite of surveillance and detect-and-avoid services with a variety of surveillance assets that, together, ensure the highest level of UAS aviation safety.”

This partnership lays the foundation for larger and more capable surveillance corridors to enable UAS “highways” across the state of North Dakota and in support of expanding the variety of commercial UAS operations across the United States.

<p>The post Harris and Grand Sky partner on UAS BVLOS super corridor first appeared on GPS World.</p>