Flight Testing Drone Contingencies during Runway Inspection in U-space Shared Airspace

Abstract

To enlarge the application of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and the future service-driven U-space for automated and autonomous air traffic, the SESAR PJ34-W3 AURA project investigates the concept of a shared airspace between U-space and controlled airspace. Part of this concept is a dynamically reconfigurable airspace based on the demands of both traditional aviation and UAS, especially in areas of high demand or at the boundaries of these airspaces.This paper discusses the flight testing of a dynamic airspace reconfiguration in an airport environment during a runway inspection operation using a camera-equipped drone. To this aim, a drone mission along the runway has been planned and conducted at the Magdeburg-Cochstedt Airport, now serving as National Experimental Test Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).The described flight testing was part of a joint exercise of DLR and The Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR), in which the impact of UAS emergencies on air traffic controllers has been under investigation. To that aim, air traffic controllers in The Netherlands were managing simulated inbound and outbound traffic at Rotterdam The Hague airport. A portion of the airspace along the runway has been assigned to a virtual U-space environment to enable a simulated runway inspection. As the baseline scenario, a drone flight along the planned part of the runway and back to the launch area has been conducted. In a second flight, an emergency landing of the drone on the runway due to a malfunction has been performed to investigate the impact of such a contingency on air traffic controllers. This contingency resulted in a temporal extension of the U-space portion of the airspace, and required suitable actions from the air traffic controllers, such as diversion or holding of arriving and departing manned air traffic.The paper describes the use case for the drone mission, and the preparations at the exercise site due to described differences and restrictions. The particularities of the communication between exercise participants is under investigation, such as transfer of the required data to be displayed in the simulation environment, and the necessities to organize, conduct and harmonize the activities at remote locations, i.e. Germany and The Netherlands. Further, the coordinate transformation and the matching of the airport environments is described. The exercise conduction and impressions from the respective working positions are presented. The paper concludes with highlighting the benefits of such a flight trial in this context, and provides initial solutions for challenges that have been encountered during the trials.