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At least 19 records

Safely Enabling Low-Altitude Airspace Operations

Near-term Goal: Enable initial low-altitude airspace and UAS operations with demonstrated safety as early as possible, within 5 years. Long-term Goal: Accommodate increased UAS operations with highest safety, efficiency, and capacity as much autonomously as possible (10-15 years).

UTM↗

Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM): Enabling Low-Altitude Airspace and UAS Operations

Many civilian applications of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have been imagined ranging from remote to congested urban areas, including goods delivery, infrastructure surveillance, agricultural support, and medical services delivery. Further, these UAS will have different equipage and capabilities based on considerations such as affordability, and mission needs applications. Such heterogeneous UAS mix, along with operations such as general aviation, helicopters, gliders must be safely accommodated at lower altitudes. However, key infrastructure to enable and safely manage widespread use of low-altitude airspace and UAS operations therein does not exist. Therefore, NASA is exploring functional design, concept and technology development, and a prototype UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system. UTM will support safe and efficient UAS operations for the delivery of goods and services

UAV↗

Enabling Civilian Low-Altitude Airspace and Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Operations

UAS operations will be safer if a UTM system is available to support the functions associated with Airspace management and geo-fencing (reduce risk of accidents, impact to other operations, and community concerns); Weather and severe wind integration (avoid severe weather areas based on prediction); Predict and manage congestion (mission safety);Terrain and man-made objects database and avoidance; Maintain safe separation (mission safety and assurance of other assets); Allow only authenticated operations (avoid unauthorized airspace use).

Unmanned↗

Design Principles and Algorithms for Air Traffic Arrival Scheduling

This report presents design principles and algorithms for building a real-time scheduler of arrival aircraft based on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling protocol. The algorithms provide the conceptual and computational foundation for the Traffic Management Advisor (TMA) of the Center/terminal radar approach control facilities (TRACON) automation system, which comprises a set of decision support tools for managing arrival traffic at major airports in the United States. The primary objective of the scheduler is to assign arrival aircraft to a favorable landing runway and schedule them to land at times that minimize delays. A further objective of the scheduler is to allocate delays between high-altitude airspace far away from the airport and low-altitude airspace near the airport. A method of delay allocation is described that minimizes the average operating cost in the presence of errors in controlling aircraft to a specified landing time. This report is a revision of an earlier paper first presented as part of an Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) lecture series in September 1995. The authors, during vigorous discussions over the details of this paper, felt it was important to the air-trafficmanagement (ATM) community to revise and extend the original 1995 paper, providing more detail and clarity and thereby allowing future researchers to understand this foundational work as the basis for the TMA's scheduling algorithms.

Center TRACON↗

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS): Evolving Trends

Near-term Goal: Enable initial low-altitude airspace and UAS operations with demonstrated safety as early as possible, within 5 years; Long-term Goal: Accommodate increased UAS operations with highest safety, efficiency, and capacity as much autonomously as possible (10-15 years).

UAS↗

Airspace Complexity and its Application in Air Traffic Management

The United States Air Traffic Management (ATM) system provides services to enable safe, orderly and efficient aircraft operations within the airspace over the continental United States and over large portions of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico. It consists of two components, Air Traffic Control (ATC) and Traffic Flow Management (TFM). The ATC function ensures that the aircraft within the airspace are separated at all times while the TFM function organizes the aircraft into a flow pattern to ensure their safe and efficient movement. In order to accomplish the ATC and TFM functions, the airspace over United States is organized into 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs). The Center airspace is stratified into low-altitude, high-altitude and super-high altitude groups of Sectors. Each vertical layer is further partitioned into several horizontal Sectors. A typical ARTCC airspace is partitioned into 20 to 80 Sectors. These Sectors are the basic control units within the ATM system.

Sridhar, Banavar↗

Operation Heli-STAR - Atlanta Communications Experiment (ACE)

Operation Heli-STAR (Helicopter Short-Haul Transportation and Aviation Research) was established and operated in Atlanta, Georgia, during the period of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. Heli-STAR had three major thrusts: (1) the establishment and operation of a helicopter-based cargo transportation system, (2) the management of low-altitude air traffic in the airspace of an urban area, and (3) the collection and analysis of research and development data associated with items 1 and 2. Heli-STAR was a cooperative industry/government program that included parcel package shippers and couriers in the Atlanta area, the helicopter industry, aviation electronics manufacturers, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and support contractors. Several detailed reports have been produced as a result of Operation Heli-STAR. These include four reports on acoustic measurements and associated analyses, and reports on the Heli-STAR tracking data including the data processing and retrieval system, the Heli-STAR cargo simulation, and the community response system. In addition, NASA's Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments (AGATE) program has produced a report describing the Atlanta Communications Experiment (ACE) which produced the avionics and ground equipment using automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) technology. This latter report is restricted to organizations belonging to NASA's AGATE industry consortium. A complete list of these reports is shown on the following page.

Source record↗

Investigating Detect-and-Avoid Surveillance Performance for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Most unmanned aircraft systems will be required to be equipped with a Detect-and-Avoid (DAA) system with a surveillance component. The surveillance performance requirements of the DAA system to detect and track intruder aircraft will depend on the encounter geometries that unmanned aircraft are expected to have with other aircraft in the airspace. This presentation shows the analysis of the encounter geometries that were simulated using historical low-altitude traffic data and some proposed UAS missions. This analysis suggests how the overall safety and performance of a surveillance system may relate to surveillance parameters such as surveillance range, horizontal and vertical fields or regard. This study proposed and investigated potential safety and performance metrics for evaluating the performance of a surveillance system, such as the ratio of undetected and late-detected separation violations, and the time to violation at first detection for given sets of surveillance parameters.

UAS↗

TPSAS-NF1676L-11456-DND

NASA’s precision scheduling and spacing research has matured to show the high potential of merging efficient flows in high density operations - Precision scheduling and efficient delay distribution minimizes early descent from enroute altitude and low-altitude vectoring - Precision merging and spacing control improves throughput - Enables the extended use of flight path optimization based procedures FAA/NASA/Industry collaboration is needed to accelerate implementation of ADS-B applications in a way that achieves the full benefit of NextGen operations to those that equip in high density airspace Integrated precision scheduling and spacing will to offer immediate and systematic benefits to airlines in many environments, even with different equipage levels and traffic densities

Harry Swenson↗