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.
Intelligent and Adaptive Automation
Collective learning and dynamic information processing that augments operations and optimization of shared resources, with built-in resilience through intelligent and adaptive automation and applications, such as enhanced weather forecasting and predictive routing efficiency.
In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance
A broad range of safety systems that proactively mitigate risks and demonstrate innovative solutions while ultimately ensuring safety to the community on the ground and in the airspace, employing services, functions, and capabilities that perform comprehensive monitoring and communication of the aviation system state, assessment of elevated risks, and mitigation actions to assure safety.
Micro-Services for Flight Operators
A diverse marketplace of appropriately authorized service providers distributed throughout the aviation ecosystem supporting flight operations with a wide range of micro-services to meet the varied needs of each operator in the local airspace.
Data and Decision Support Marketplace
A data-and-reasoning fabric providing an open virtual ecosystem of secured software infrastructure, tools, protocols, governance and policies to implement, manage and operate data sharing and reasoning services across the entire span of mobility for real-time decision support.
We envision two community groups, day of use and contributing. Contributing stakeholders perform research, development, and implementation to ensure the day of use stakeholders are successful.
Day of Use Stakeholders
Contributing Stakeholders
Planning
A commercial supersonic flight operator publishes airline schedules for services to transport passengers over land and water. Initial flight paths are optimized in line with company sustainability objectives.
In-Time Aviation System-Wide Safety Assurance is leveraged in pre-flight planning, and Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight deconflicts planned trajectories with airspace, airborne, and ground hazards based on flight operator specified aircraft mission objectives and characteristics.
The scheduled departure day arrives and passengers board the commercial supersonic aircraft. Ground personnel perform the necessary pre-flight checks using Intelligent and Adaptive Automation systems that analyze system sensors historical maintenance trends for the aircraft. The aircraft takes off into the seamlessly integrated airspace.
Operation
In flight, the aircraft publishes aircraft state information, system health status, subsystem health status, operational intent, etc. to the Data and Decision Support Marketplace where qualified Micro-Services for Flight Operators providers perform real-time monitoring. Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight systems monitor operational intent of relevant traffic aircraft for any potential impact to the supersonic aircraft’s flight path. The supersonic aircraft shares its operational intent as well, ensuring other operators will apply the appropriate right-of-way in any conflicts.
The Micro-Services for Flight Operators providers aggregate data from disparate airspace stakeholders and use Intelligent and Adaptive Automation to detect, diagnose, and predict potential hazards and risks consistent with In-Time Aviation System-Wide Safety Assurance.
As predicted, the risk elevates to an actual conflict. Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight systems alert both aircraft and prompt the non-supersonic burdened aircraft to alter its flight path accordingly. Operational intents are continually updated and monitored for any future conflicts.
Success
The supersonic aircraft successfully avoids any potential safety incidents while maintaining safe separation on the operator’s optimized flight path.
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