Air Traffic Management: Special Report Roundup

Eurocontrol and partners including Airbus, IATA and Thales have issued a report aimed at helping advance the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in aviation and especially air traffic management (ATM).

Work started after Eurocontrol—the agency in charge of ATM in Europe—hosted its inaugural conference on AI in May 2019, when the European Aviation High Level Group on AI was created. The goal of the “Fly AI” report is “to advance understanding among aviation and ATM actors of AI and its potential, to ‘demystify AI’ and to help accelerate its uptake in aviation.”

Honeywell is upgrading the airfield lighting and surface movement guidance systems at Incheon International Airport (RKSI) near Seoul, South Korea.

It is a flagship project for the U.S. manufacturer, which is installing its airfield ground lighting control and monitoring system (AGLCMS) and advanced surface movement guidance and control system (A-SMGCS) at RKSI, South Korea’s largest airport. Honeywell expects taxiway lighting improvements to be finished by April, with the remainder of the project completed by October 2022.

The UK will need people skilled in airspace design as it rolls out a major, nation-wide update of its airspace system, British Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps has said.

“We have an enormous amount of airspace reorganization to do, and we have about four qualified airspace designers,” Shapps said Mar. 6 in an exclusive interview with Aviation Week Network editors. “As a government, we’re trying to send a very clear signal to the market that if you happen to have skills in this area or you’re a company who are involved in it, Britain needs you.”

Thales is gearing up for its first deliveries of the DME 500, the French group’s fifth-generation distance measuring equipment (DME) which is compatible with existing onboard receivers.

“We have some launch customers, we will deliver the first examples in the third or fourth quarter this year and entry into service will follow within weeks,” Thales’ managing director of navigation aids and surveillance Kais Mnif said.

Aireon and Searidge Technologies announced a partnership on Mar. 10 to integrate satellite-routed position data from aircraft into Searidge’s “digital tower” platform for large airports.

Aireon’s space-based automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) data will become one of the multiple data sources that feed into Searidge’s artificial intelligence-enabled digital tower system that presents information to controllers and airport operators.

Finland’s Nokia has announced the deployment of an upgraded, IP-based air traffic control communications network for the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) following the completion of a series of live trials in North Atlantic airspace.

Nokia supplied IP/MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) networking products specifically designed for mission-critical applications, plus integration and testing services. MPLS is a telecommunications routing method that enables fast switching of data across a network.

Air traffic management is fast developing. In addition to the forecast growth of air traffic movements in the coming years, new and smaller aircraft will populate the skies, posing new challenges and requirements in the context of aging surveillance infrastructure in need of replacement or augmentation.

We asked several questions on this topic to Matthew Gilligan, vice president of Navigation and Modernization Solutions. He leads the modernization of mission-critical systems and a portfolio of air traffic management products, including Skyler, a radar solution that provides precise data, rendering a high-resolution airspace picture in a short amount of time.

More than 45,000 respondents have commented on the FAA’s draft regulation for remote identification of drones as of the March 2 deadline.

The public comment period for the so-called “Remote ID” notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) closed as expected with an avalanche of reaction to proposed requirements that are considered onerous by drone hobbyists but tolerable to commercial interests. The FAA released the draft rule on Dec. 31, 2019, giving the public 60 days to respond.

Satellite communications (satcom) terminal supplier Isotropic Systems will license components of its optical multi-beamforming antenna technology to aerospace and defense companies to build products “capable of unleashing a new era of inflight connectivity.”

In a Mar. 4 release, Isotropic Systems reports that “early collaborative licensing discussions are underway” with unidentified aircraft manufacturers, satcom terminal developers and systems integrators to integrate its patented optical beamforming lens modules and chipsets.

Air traffic control (ATC) equipment supplier Rohde & Schwarz has signed a contract with Naviair, Denmark's air navigation service provider, for a backup radio communications system.

The VCS-4G system—which uses VoIP and has an intuitive graphical user interface—will be installed at Copenhagen Airport’s area control and approach center, as well as in the south control tower.