On the Use of Height Rules in Off-route Airspace

Ford, Ray

doi:10.1017/s037346330002498x

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…The hemispheric rule is a widely used airspace structuring example found in manned aviation. This rule ensures that cruising aircraft above flight level FL240 with respective travel directions in ranges of 000-089 • and 090-179 • are assigned to odd flight-levels in multiples of 10, while cruising aircraft with headings between 180-269 • and 270-360 • are also allocated to fly at even flight-levels in multiples of 10 [28,29]. Similar to the hemispheric rule, there also exists a more finer-grained airspace concept known as the quadrantal rule, which is enforced within the altitude range of 3000 ft to FL240 [28].…”

Section: Airspace Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

2021

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Large-scale adoption of drone-based delivery in urban areas promise societal benefits with respect to emissions and on-ground traffic congestion, as well as potential cost savings for drone-based logistic companies. However, for this to materialise, the ability of accommodating high volumes of drone traffic in an urban airspace is one of the biggest challenges. For unconstrained airspace, it has been shown that traffic alignment and segmentation can be used to mitigate conflict probability. The current study investigates the application of these principles to a highly constrained airspace. We propose two urban airspace concepts, applying road-based analogies of two-way and one-way streets by imposing horizontal structure. Both of the airspace concepts employ heading-altitude rules to vertically segment cruising traffic according to their travel direction. These airspace configurations also feature transition altitudes to accommodate turning flights that need to decrease the flight speed in order to make safe turns at intersections. While using fast-time simulation experiments, the performance of these airspace concepts is compared and evaluated for multiple traffic demand densities in terms of safety, stability, and efficiency. The results reveal that an effective way to structure drone traffic in a constrained urban area is to have vertically segmented altitude layers with respect to travel direction as well as horizontal constraints imposed to the flow of traffic. The study also makes recommendations for areas of future research, which are aimed at supporting dynamic traffic demand patterns.

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Section: Airspace Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

2021

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“…Aviation is three-dimensional, so more information is required to adequately notify the pilot of objects in the vicinity of the aircraft. Of course, one-dimensional safety measures do exist in aviation, such as vertical separation for air traffic and the TCAS-II [ 7 , 18 , 19 ]. It is possible to find more information about the state of any object that appears in the radar image.…”

Section: Hardwarementioning

confidence: 99%

A portable primary radar for general aviation

Maas

Gent²

2020

PLoS ONE

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A detailed situation awareness of the local environment is essential for safe flight in General Aviation. When operating under Visual Flight Rules, eyesight is crucial for maintaining situation awareness and objects may be overlooked. Technical solutions such as Flarm have been sought, but they only work on a basis of cooperation: obstacles without the proper equipment are invisible. Recent developments in the field of radar technology, partly empowered by the demand for sensors for autonomous cars, have improved the size and power consumption of available hardware. Today, the hardware exists to build a portable primary radar system for situation awareness. In this paper the results are presented of efforts to build the first portable primary radar for general, which has to be lightweight, cheap and have a low power consumption. The focus in this paper is on the software design of such a radar system. The physical principles of radar sensing are described, as well as the scientific steps needed to provide situation awareness. The hardware and software for the radar are both built and tested, and the results of these tests are presented. A flight experiment is performed with a small aircraft flying past a stationary radar on a small hill. It is found that the radar is capable of detecting the aircraft up to a distance of at least 3 kilometers. 3D localization is performed and the location determined by the radar was on average 46 meters away from the aircraft position as measured by satellite navigation, relative to a total distance of about 1000 meters from the radar. A low-pass filter can be applied on the raw results in order to improve the location estimation further. Future research will focus on bringing the portable radar in motion while operating.

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“…In the field of ATM, such models were first used to analyze the collision risk between adjacent routes of the North Atlantic track system [21,22,23]. Subsequently, they have also been used to investigate the safety of a wide variety of airspace types, including high altitude en route airways [24,25,26], low altitude terminal airspaces [27,28,29,30], and for concepts that closely resemble unstructured and layered airspace concepts [31,32,33].…”

Section: No Of Combinations Of Two Aircraftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three-dimensional conflict count models for unstructured and layered airspace designs

Sunil

Ellerbroek

Maas

2018

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

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This paper presents analytical models that describe the safety of unstructured and layered en route airspace designs. Here, 'unstructured airspace' refers to airspace designs that offer operators complete freedom in path planning, whereas 'layered airspace' refers to airspace concepts that utilize heading-altitude rules to vertically separate cruising aircraft based on their travel directions. With a focus on the intrinsic safety provided by an airspace design, the models compute instantaneous conflict counts as a function of traffic demand and airspace design parameters, such as traffic separation requirements and the permitted heading range per flight level. While previous studies have focused primarily on conflicts between cruising aircraft, the models presented here also take into account conflicts involving climbing and descending traffic. Fast-time simulation experiments used to validate the modeling approach indicate that the models estimate instantaneous conflict counts with high accuracy for both airspace designs. The simulation results also show that climbing and descending traffic caused the majority of conflicts for layered airspaces with a narrow heading range per flight level, highlighting the importance of including all aircraft flight phases for a comprehensive safety analysis. Because such trends could be accurately predicted by the three-dimensional models derived here, these analytical models can be used as tools for airspace design applications as they provide a detailed understanding of the relationships between the parameters that influence the safety of unstructured and layered airspace designs.

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On the Use of Height Rules in Off-route Airspace

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

Constrained Urban Airspace Design for Large-Scale Drone-Based Delivery Traffic

A portable primary radar for general aviation

Three-dimensional conflict count models for unstructured and layered airspace designs

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