Proposed avionics architecture for Air Force Air Mobility Command aircraft to meet CNS/ATM and GATM requirements

Abstract

Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) aircraft must meet military requirements for transport missions anywhere in the world while also addressing emerging Civil Aviation Authority requirements for Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) for operation in the Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) environment. An architecture designed to meet these requirements must accommodate existing avionics to the maximum extent possible to minimize costs and must also incorporate new avionics that take advantage of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS)/Non Developmental Items (NDI) and open system architectures to be able to incorporate the growth necessitated by these emerging requirements. This paper describes a generic architecture designed to meet these requirements for a tanker/transport platform. The architecture is designed so that future upgrades for these evolving requirements could be met with minimal impact to the aircraft. The implementation of this architecture is primarily a systems engineering effort in managing the human machine interface necessary to provide a seamless integration of GATM and navigation safety equipment including an Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS), a Communication Management Function (CMF), a Multi-Mode Receiver (MMR), a traffic collision and avoidance system (TCAS), new communications radios, a new displays subsystem and existing flight management systems that are modified, as necessary, to support Required Navigation Performance (RNP) objectives.