Eric Euteneuer

UAS insertion into commercial airspace: Europe and US standards perspective

The use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) by the military has greatly increased over the last decade. This experience has led to the development of Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and technology in line with defense and security missions. It is evident that UASs are becoming the militarys choice for dull, dirty and dangerous missions. Prompted by the militarys experience, civil agencies have identified a large variety of missions that potentially could be performed by UASs with clear benefits. UAS are already in production and use today. However, they are limited in their use within civil airspace due to the lack of mature sense-and-avoid technology and undefined methods for proving safety. These key requirements will not only enable military, civil, and eventually commercial objectives, they will have a direct impact in initial and operating costs. Therefore, to unlock the potential of UASs, it is required to develop affordable UAS solutions that can be safely and transparently integrated into non-segregated airspace. It is important to realize that unmanned civil aviation is a revolution, not an evolution, as CONOPS and the necessary technology for flight in non-segregated airspace are not mature, and standards (MASPS or MOPS) do not exist. Therefore, UAS integration into non-segregated airspace will require the simultaneous development of CONOPS, technology and standards, and the involvement of all UAS stakeholders, that is, end users, industry, regulators, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), etc. from all over the world. Two groups are leading the development of standards for safe and transparent UAS integration into non-segregated airspace: EUROCAE WG-73 in Europe; and RTCA SC-203 in the US. WG-73 will propose its developed standards to EASA and the European National Aviation Authorities (NAAs), whereas SC-203 will propose its developed standards to the FAA. Therefore, if WG-73 and SC-203 are not aligned, there is a risk that different standards are developed on either side of the Atlantic. Consequently, UAS solutions will not be interoperable, and standards will be costlier and take longer to develop. This is not in the interest of any of the UAS stakeholders and especially the end users. This paper will compare the activities of WG-73 and SC-203. The focus will be on Sense-And-Avoid (SAA) activities for Beyond Visual Line-Of-Sight (BVLOS) operations and will expand on the ATM environment, markets/CONOPS, and UAS safety objectives.

An Alternative Time Metric to Modified Tau for Unmanned Aircraft System Detect And Avoid

This paper documents a study that drove the development of a mathematical expression in the detect-and-avoid (DAA) minimum operational performance standards (MOPS) for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). This equation describes the conditions under which vertical maneuver guidance should be provided during recovery of DAA well clear separation with a non-cooperative VFR aircraft. Although the original hypothesis was that vertical maneuvers for DAA well clear recovery should only be offered when sensor vertical rate errors are small, this paper suggests that UAS climb and descent performance should be considered—in addition to sensor errors for vertical position and vertical rate—when determining whether to offer vertical guidance. A fast-time simulation study involving 108,000 encounters between a UAS and a non-cooperative visual-flight-rules aircraft was conducted. Results are presented showing that, when vertical maneuver guidance for DAA well clear recovery was suppressed, the minimum vertical separation increased by roughly 50 feet (or horizontal separation by 500 to 800 feet). However, the percentage of encounters that had a risk of collision when performing vertical well clear recovery maneuvers was reduced as UAS vertical rate performance increased and sensor vertical rate errors decreased. A class of encounter is identified for which vertical-rate error had a large effect on the efficacy of horizontal maneuvers due to the difficulty of making the correct left/right turn decision: crossing conflict with intruder changing altitude. Overall, these results support logic that would allow vertical maneuvers when UAS vertical performance is sufficient to avoid the intruder, based on the intruder’s estimated vertical position and vertical rate, as well as the vertical rate error of the UAS’ sensor. To read the full paper please visit https://www.nasa.gov/aeroresearch/programs/iasp/uas/abstracts

Multi-intruder aircraft, multi-sensor tracking system

The National Airspace is evolving with the introduction of new types of aircraft and increased surveillance and safety requirements. Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems are designed to meet these requirements for both cooperative and non-cooperative air traffic. In this paper, we describe the Honeywell Tracking System (HTS) which provides DAA systems with accurate and smooth tracks for cooperative and non-cooperative intruder aircraft relative to an ownship aircraft. The HTS uses a combination of cooperative and non-cooperative sensors to track thirty intruder aircraft within one framework in real-time. We demonstrate the performance of the HTS using the results of two flight tests with cooperative and non-cooperative intruder aircraft.

Multi-intruder, multi-sensor tracking system

This article consists of a collection of slides from the authors conference presentation.