Flight management enabling technologies for single pilot operations in Small Air Transport vehicles in the COAST project

Abstract

Small Air Transport (SAT) is emerging as suitable transportation means in order to allow efficient travel over a regional range, in particular for commuters, based on the use of small airports and fixed wing aircraft with 5 to 19 seats, belonging to the EASA CS-23 category. The affordability of the SAT industry needs to be supported by the availability of new technological solutions allowing reducing the related operational costs while at the same time maintaining the required flight safety levels. In this framework, Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking funded the project COAST (Cost Optimized Avionics SysTem), which started in 2016 with the aim of tackling this challenge and delivering key technology enablers for the affordable cockpit and avionics, while also enabling the single pilot operations for small aircraft. The project activities cover several technologies and, among them, some selected ones, specifically addressing flight management, are considered in this paper, whose aim is the one of providing an outline of the design and implementation process status reached up to date, emphasizing the obtained results and the work to be done in the future activities expected to be performed in the project. The selected technologies here considered are the ones of tactical traffic separation and enhanced situational awareness, meteorological enhanced awareness, and pilot’s incapacitation emergency management. The paper, therefore, focuses on a selected cluster, from the overall framework of the COAST project, of SAT single pilot operations enabling technologies: Tactical Separation System (TSS), Flight Reconfiguration System (FRS), and Advanced Weather Awareness System (AWAS). In the paper, a description is first reported of the overall COAST project objectives, motivations and approach to the SAT vehicles cockpit design. Then, the implemented design process is outlined and the description of each of the above-indicated selected technologies is presented (the additional technologies considered in the COAST project are out of the scope of this paper). Based on that, for each of the considered systems (TSS, FRS, AWAS) the status of the design and implementation process is described and the next steps expected to be implemented in the project are outlined.

Evolution of the Tactical Separation System to support the Integrated Mission Management System in the COAST project

“…Based on such background, CIRA developed in COAST the TSS, reaching the TRL 6 in 2021, based on the successful results of the dedicated flight test campaign. The evolution over time of the TSS design and implementation in the COAST project is reported in the previous reference works, from [17] to [26]. In this paper, in section 2 an outline is provided of the TSS achievements so far, until the completion of the dedicated flight demonstration campaign.…”

Enhancement of the Advanced Weather Awareness System for the development of an Integrated Mission Management System in the COAST project

“…Small Air Transport (SAT) is an increasingly important means of transport for travel on a regional scale. The COAST (Cost Optimized Avionics SysTem) project [1], funded by Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking in the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, has been working since 2016 on delivering key technologies for the affordable cockpit and avionics of SAT vehicles, also enabling single pilot operations. Several technologies are under development in the COAST project, presented in [1]; among them, three are specifically designed to address flight management and support pilots in making decisions, enhancing their situational and weather awareness:…”

Latest developments in AWAS: the Advanced Weather Awareness System in the COAST Project

“…In this perspective, the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking in the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme funded the COAST (Cost Optimized Avionics SysTem) project with the aim to develop key technologies for the design of affordable avionic system for the SAT vehicles cockpit, also enabling single pilot operations. The project, described in [1], covers several technologies, some of them addressing flight management, such as the Advanced Weather Awareness System, aimed to increase pilot's weather awareness. More in details, the objectives of AWAS are to provide and visualize on-board consolidated and updated synthetic information concerning weather hazards occurring during the flight.…”