Weekly review #63- 26th August

ANSP news

• In the first 15 days of August air traffic in Italy grows 30% vs July - ENAV announces that in the first half of August it has handled 48,000 flights, up 33% vs July, with an average of 3,200 flights managed per day vs the 2,400 flights per day of July, confirming the growth trend of air traffic in Italy.

• BULATSA ASSIST principle: How to effectively sustain safe operations - Georgi Peev, BULATSA Director General, gives an insight as to how his ANSP has been coping with the challenges of COVID-19

Context information

• SITTI as founding member of ATI Air Tech Italy - At the end of July 2020, AIR TECH ITALY, the first Association of Italian companies supplying products, technologies, systems and services to airports and air traffic control was established. The Association aims at promoting the excellence and know-how of Italian industry, by creating synergies and collaborations between companies to compete in an organised and competitive manner on the market, both domestic and abroad.

Reports and data

• ​NAV CANADA reports July traffic figures - NAV CANADA announced today its traffic figures for the month of July 2020 as measured in weighted charging units for en-route, terminal and oceanic air navigation services, in comparison to the last fiscal year. Traffic in July 2020 decreased by an average of 67.6 per cent compared to the same month in 2019. NAV CANADA's fiscal year runs from September 1 to August 31.

• Frankfurt Airport: Weekly Traffic Figures for August 10 – August 16, 2020

UAV and UTM

• How should we start to define safety risks for UAM/AAM operations? - Unmanned airspace - Setting the target level of safety for unmanned operations has been causing difficulties across the industry for a while. This article seeks to go back to the basics of safety-risk management and build up a series of arguments in defining what should be acceptable. In its most simplistic manner, risk management seeks to answer the questions: how many people can I kill and how often can I kill that number of people? This is rather different from the “safety by compliance” argument that has been followed by some high-consequence industries and some elements of the incomplete aviation jigsaw of safety regulation.

• UTM commences with Airservices Australia release of its requirements for a Flight Information Management System - Airservices has today released its Request for Information (RFI) for the development of a Flight Information Management System (FIMS) Prototype to be built with industry partners over coming months. FIMS is a data exchange gateway that connects UAS Traffic Management (UTM) participants with Australia’s air traffic management system.

• Industry viewpoint: Is the timing right for harmonisation of UTM/ATM standards? - Air Traffic Management - The global harmonisation of UTM and ATM standards is an undisputed enabler of further growth of the emerging drone industry. For genuine harmonisation to happen there is a need for all involved stakeholders to understand each other’s capabilities and work together collaboratively towards a shared vision.

• New tech to open up skies for drone operations - Airservices Australia - Safe and fast approvals for drone operations in city skies across Australia are one step closer thanks to a new partnership between Airservices Australia and Queensland University of Technology. Airservices and QUT will work together to develop new technologies and systems to give drone operators automatic and near real-time flight approvals, meaning products and services can reach people and places faster, without risking safety.

• India’s regulator supports BVLOS flight trials to help define regulatory framework - Unmanned airspace - India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is supporting beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) trials to help define a regulatory framework for Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs). Led by AutoMicroUAS, a leading Indian drone manufacturer, a number of BVLOS test flights will be performed over the course of the following months to collect as much data as possible to make routine UAV deployment on a large scale possible in the future.