A flexible airborne datalink system architecture for civil helicopters

Due to high operating cost, limited coverage range, complex installation and additional weight, helicopter and other general aviation aircraft may not have datalink function implemented as portion of its avionics system. However, datalink has great advantages of releasing crowed VHF channel resources, reducing pilot and controller workload, supporting automation application, gaining time efficiency and operation precision. During the preflight, in-the-air and post-flight periods, general aviation operators and ground stations always demand data from helicopters, similar to Airline Operation Control (AOC) for air transportation. The automotive control trends and mandatory standards also drive the installation of data communication for the helicopters. By using SysML modeling language, this paper tries to identify the data link communication scenarios and requirements for helicopters. The feasibility of utilizing existing high speed mobile network for helicopters data communication is analyzed and confirmed, which removes the cost obstacles of helicopter datalink applications. Based on the operational concept and requirement analysis, flexible and scalable datalink system architecture for helicopters is proposed, which support both the VHF ACARS and mobile cellular network. Since the weight and size of airborne system for helicopter is severely restricted, besides the data communication radios, all the other router, protocol stacks and applications should be hosted in the modular computing resources and/or multi-function displays. With an integrated data communication radio and the datalink partition hosted applications, the airborne datalink system can support the 4G/LTE, WiFi, VHF ACARS and other future new communication channels, e.g. broadband satellite communication and AeroMACS system etc.