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Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight

A capability of cooperative and coordinated flight operations founded on a platform of secure digital information exchange, distributed authority, and intelligent onboard automation for flight path management in four dimensions (lateral, vertical, & time) to promote ubiquitous, safe, seamless, and efficient airspace utilization for all operators and with flexible architectures that enable operators to achieve their unique and diverse mission objectives with minimal restriction.

Attributes

  • Operator leverages onboard trajectory automation, human-pilot mission oversight (onboard or remote), and collaboration with service providers to ensure flight safety and efficiency
  • Integrates 4D flight path management functions seamlessly with coordination rules and cooperative intent-sharing to ensure traffic separation
  • Leverages connectivity to an extensive and cyber-secure ecosystem of operational data
  • Balances individual and system performance through transparent constraint policy
  • Implemented through distributed automation for consistent, reliable, resilient, and scalable application

Sub Capabilities

Help us identify sub-capabilities or related capabilities by providing input below.

Automated flight path management including traffic deconfliction and contingency management
In-flight strategic and tactical deconfliction
Traffic awareness through cooperative / non-cooperative surveillance and intent sharing
Traffic-compatible flight optimization
Optimized, deconflicted routes conforming to flow constraints
Simplified Vehicle Operations (SVO) extended to include automation of flight path decision-making
Cooperative rules and procedures for conflict management
Secure access to relevant and timely operational data

Research Questions

Help us identify research questions to guide further exploration.

How does Digital Flight operations integrate with VFR and IFR operations?
How much operational intent sharing is needed to ensure Digital Flight operations are cooperative and coordinated with Digital Airspace and other flight operators?

Barriers

Help us identify barriers to describe obstacles we will need to address.

We need your input.