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.
Operate From Anywhere
A substantial expansion of the locations and operational conditions under which vehicles can access the National Airspace System, including expanded use of the nation’s existing uncontrolled aerodromes and flexible creation of new temporary and permanent aerodromes with minimal required permanent infrastructure, and support for low-visibility and high demand operations.
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 large-scale tornado event devastates a massive region of 100s of square miles. Information on various aspects of the emergency is made available through the Data and Decision Support Marketplace. Because of land ownership diversity, a critical aspect for success is the need to integrate aircraft, weather, terrain, vehicles, staff, and other planning data across a broad swath of federal, state, and local emergency services and other diverse resources in real-time.
To adapt the community’s general response strategy to the specific situation, the response coordinator deploys a fleet of small uncrewed aircraft to further assess the situation and define needs. The aircraft use Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight to self-separate while efficiently mapping out the area of damage using mapping strategies developed in real time by Intelligent and Adaptive Automation.
Operation
Digital Airspace establishes temporary flight restrictions in critical areas to maximize relief efforts while protecting all authorized operators providing aid. The safe integration of uncrewed and crewed flight operations to maximize emergency response effectiveness is enabled by Cooperative and Coordinated Digital Flight and real-time adapted Digital CNS Infrastructure.
Response coordinator sets up virtual or in-situ command for cooperative search and rescue, medical, fire, weather, and communications, as needed, utilizing In-Time System Wide Safety Assurance to monitor overall system safety. Micro-Services for Flight Operators providers gather and distribute information where needed as quickly as possible.
Small uncrewed aircraft continue to monitor for air delivery of supplies to affected area to meet the needs of injured personnel and distressed neighborhoods. Operate from Essentially Anywhere, Anytime facilitates the use of many unprepared landing sites for relief efforts.
Success
Many diverse aircraft provide welcome relief and needed support for people on the ground.
The extensive and immediate air support helped to quickly stabilize the situation and continues to support long term recovery.
Help us identify research questions to guide further exploration.
Help us identify barriers to describe obstacles we will need to address.