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Digital Airspace

A capability of airspace and air traffic management founded on a platform of digital information and automation to promote safe, seamless, and flexible airspace utilization for all operators and considers airspace constraints dynamically by digital means to ensure system performance and safety.

Attributes

  • Highly federated to avoid the concentration of complexities found in a monolithic system and allow operators to take a more active role in airspace transformation
  • Managing system for airspace constraints and exceptions, allowing flexibility where possible and applying structure only where necessary
  • Designed using cybersecurity technologies to ensure availability, integrity, and confidentiality of all information, continuous monitoring to prevent vulnerabilities
  • Dynamic constraints and disruption management, using predictive intelligent automation to proactively relax restrictions at the earliest time
  • Collaborative with Digital Flight, partnering with advanced operator capabilities for time-based decision-making and precision conformance
  • Real-time infrastructure and resource availability with inter-connected digital communication exchange, factoring in airport dynamics, aircraft performance and capabilities, and predictive weather
  • Agile approach to demand/capacity balancing for all operations
  • Balances total system optimization between global and local environments

Sub Capabilities

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

Management by Exception
Disruption Management
Constraint Management and Dissemination
Geofencing of major airport arrival/departure paths
Digital scheduling coordination in off-nominal scenarios
Synthetic voice capability to crewed aircraft & ATC

Research Questions

Help us identify research questions to guide further exploration.

How will digital airspace management and traditional ATC interoperate?
How will airspace utilization and constraints be managed equitably?

Barriers

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

We need your input.