Article

EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub: an important catalyst to speeding upper & lower airspace management integration

Innovation Hub

The EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub in Brétigny is playing an increasingly important role in supporting Member States develop more integrated, digital and holistic approaches to accommodating new airspace entrants.

The global airspace management world has entered a new transformative phase.

As well as finding new ways to manage legacy commercial aviation traffic more effectively, governments and their air traffic management (ATM) stakeholders face the growing challenge of hosting a new generation of airspace entrants at lower and higher altitudes. Regulators and air navigation service providers (ANSPs) have to ensure these new entrants can be integrated within the current ATM system safely and sustainably by adopting new technologies and procedures which will allow for the safe but rapid acceleration in aircraft movements below 5,000 ft and above FL550.

New digital and automated technologies are the key to safely and securely implementing these new aircraft operators and EUROCONTROL’s Innovation Hub has become an increasingly important resource to support Member States, civil aviation authorities, ANSPs and regulators to understand how these new technologies can be introduced in an optimal way around the very different priorities of each Member State.

A new era of low altitude operations

The challenges of developing new low altitude air traffic management systems are particularly diverse and complex. Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) – and soon electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft – need to be safely integrated with current controlled (and uncontrolled) airspaces with a minimum impact on air traffic controllers, while enabling an acceleration in beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations to allow for scalability, all within a single competitive European Union-wide market. More broadly, Member States need to build a sustainable environment for drone operators, U-space service providers (USSPs) and common information service providers (CISPs).

“Digitising air traffic management is the most efficient way to tackle safety, scalability and sustainability at the same time, shaping a new way to manage the air traffic for drone operations that are soon becoming part of our everyday lives,” said Farah Luu, Project Manager at the Drones Programme at the EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub. “Our team is dedicated to the support to States in UAS/U-space regulation and implementation, and more specifically with the airspace risk assessment (ARA) process.”

More than 10 States, including Lithuania, Estonia and Spain, have now engaged the Innovation Hub team in helping to understand and assess the best way to enable and support UAS operations, each of them having very different needs and interests.

“We provide a range of workshops to understand the local context, explain the ARA method and share lessons learnt and best practices we have seen developed in other Member States,” said Farah Luu. “Airspace risk assessments are needed not just to support all the stakeholders in creating a U-space airspace but also to make it sustainable.”

The work is complex. “Risk” here applies to several factors, including security, privacy, environmental and safety areas. The full airspace risk assessment takes several months and as each Member State has different geographic, business and political priorities the programmes must be highly customised, though with the EU’s U-space regulation at its core. In particular, EUROCONTROL’s historic focus on safety analysis has been used to help airports develop their understanding of how UAS will be integrated in and around airport airspace.

Higher Airspace Operations

“One of the things that is usually underestimated is the effort to get the data: the current levels of operations, the locations, where they take place and the kind of business that is operating,” said Farah Luu. “Environmental and privacy issues are sometimes overlooked but they are essential elements.”

The Innovation Hub team uses a simulator to build a picture of the U-space area under assessment, to verify the assumptions made to define the capacity and performance requirements that the Member State would like to set for its U-space airspace. EUROCONTROL feeds back the difficulties and needs expressed by the Member State to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) team, helping develop the standards and regulations for U-space, so challenges and solutions can be understood at a more granular level.

“We are optimistic – U-space is new, exciting and we have several means to achieve it, with the freedom to experience different cases, through testing and learning, to find our way there,” said Farah Luu.

"We are optimistic – U-space is new, exciting and we have several means to achieve it, with the freedom to experience different cases, through testing and learning, to find our way there."

Higher airspace operations

The challenges of integrating Higher Airspace Operations (HAO) are also being addressed at the Innovation Hub. These are very different challenges but are part of the same process of looking at how a future ATM digital airspace architecture can be developed to flexibly manage all types of crewed and uncrewed aircraft.

The Innovation Hub has a research agreement with Ente Nazionale per l'Aviazione Civile (ENAC), Italy’s civil aviation authority to prepare, execute real-time simulations (RTS) on the Hub’s ESCAPE simulator to validate how ATM can be adapted to accommodate a range of Higher Airspace Operations and Commercial Space Transportation such as suborbital flights and orbital re-entry operations.

A spaceport is being developed at Grottaglie Airport to host suborbital flights as early as 2027 and 2028 and the Hub will provide vital real-time simulations of the operation, bringing together civil and military controllers, to validate both “nominal” and “non-nominal” operations.

The Hub’s simulator is being used not only to collaborate with ENAC and support the Italian roadmap towards the accommodation of those new operations, but also to contribute to the validation roadmap of the SESAR ECHO 2 programme and in particular, to validate other airspace entrant operations such as High-Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) missions.

The heterogeneity of these operations presents unique challenges in terms of performance and airspace integration.

According to Innovation Hub validation expert Stefano Tiberia: “Our primary focus is on two key phases: accommodation and integration. Initially, accommodation allows new entrants into the airspace without significant changes to existing ATM systems. This involves designated times or areas for these operations, ensuring safety and efficiency for traditional airspace users. The ultimate goal, however, is full integration, where new entrants are treated as equal participants within the ATM system, necessitating substantial modifications to ATM policies, procedures and technologies. The impact of these operations on current airspace users and the ATM, particularly ATC, is a central concern and the main validation objective of the simulations.”

Slow-moving, high altitude HAPS aircraft – which can operate for weeks and months at flight levels above FL550 serving as communications platforms for rural areas – pose several challenges to ATM. The vehicles are very slow in the climb and descent through commercial airspace. Today, the very few that are flying require complete segregation from other aircraft but as the number of these vehicles increases more integrated, digital procedures will be required.

“The simulator will also be used to understand how future supersonic and hypersonic aircraft can be accommodated within the current airspace architecture and finally integrated,” said Stefano Tiberia. “It has become clear for a while that we will have to modernise our legacy simulation platform to adapt to new ATM technologies and new airspace users.”

The Hub is developing a new platform which will allow researchers by the end of the decade to provide more wide-ranging, flexible and holistic simulations.

“The current platform requires all stakeholders, such as controllers and pilots, to travel to Brétigny if they want to undertake major real-time simulations,” said Stefano Tiberia. “Even if performing simulation with all actors in the same site is a strong and valuable asset that we need to keep, we want to develop a platform that allows cloud-based operations to allow actors to participate remotely. We are currently limited to 40 or 50 controller positions, but we will need to carry out much larger simulations. We undertake some cross-border simulations now but the new platform will open up many more possibilities for these operations, with more complex simulations requiring far less preparatory time.

“The new systems will also allow all stakeholders – regulators, airports, ANSPs, airspace users – to understand how they will integrate their operations in future airspace architectures. It will allow us, for the first time, to look at how a fully integrated airspace, from drones operating a few hundred feet from the ground to high altitude platforms along with hypersonic aircraft could be developed, managed and scaled.”

Farah Luu
Farah Luu
UTM project manager at the drones programme
EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub
Stefano Tiberia
Stefano Tiberia
Validation Expert
EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub

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