Drone medical deliveries are expected to reduce urgent transport by road, improve medical logistics, enhance patient health outcome and have a positive ecological impact.
So it was great to see the launch of the two-year Safe And Flexible IntegRation of advanced U-space services for MEDical air mobility project (SAFIR-Med) last week. Five drone platforms will be combined with manned aviation in operational exercises validating technology in real urban environments across Europe. They will cover a variety of technologies that together will support a wide range of medical use cases.
We also saw that GKN Aerospace will play a leading role in the UK Future Flight Challenge from its new GBP32 million Global Technology Centre in Bristol. The programme will address the integration of unmanned and autonomous systems evolving at pace, and examines how to integrate autonomous systems in shared airspace in a safe manner.
And, finally, we saw and wanted to highlight the news of a new, Intelligent Approach to maximising runway efficiency. With airports so badly hit by the impact of the Covid crisis, being able to maximise the value and efficiency of existing assets – especially runways – is going to be of critical importance over the coming years as we begin to see traffic return.
Intelligent Approach is a suite of tools that allow air traffic controllers to significantly improve the consistency of spacing between arriving aircraft in order to maximise runway efficiency. The software generates markers between arrivals based on the individual aircraft type so controllers can more readily hit the optimum spacing.
Sounds great to us! Let us know what you think.
ANSP news
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Optimism Still Lacking In Aviation Sector Recovery Forecasts - Oro Navigacjia - The year that has begun keeps demonstrating sparse number of flights. In comparison to January of the previous year, the flight flows decreased by 57.6 percent and comprised a little bit more than 8 thousand flights, whereas the number of overflights decreased by 53.5 percent (6.7 thousand flights).
Market news
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Groupe ADP and ADP Ingénierie sign the new airport of Mosul - ADP Ingénierie - ADP Ingénierie, for Groupe ADP, just signed an agreement for the studies aiming at launching the reconstruction of Mosul airport, devastated by the siege of Daech in 2012.
Context information
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The UTM industry is facing a financial crisis – business models no longer work - Unmanned airspace - The global UTM/U-space service supplier (USS) market is facing a major crisis before it really takes off – for most suppliers there will be a significant shortfall in planned income over the next two to three years and many will be forced out of business.
Reports and data
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2020 Worst Year for Air Cargo Demand Since Performance Monitoring Began - IATA - The International Air Transport Association (IATA) released data for global air freight markets showing that demand for air cargo decreased by 10.6% in 2020, compared to 2019.
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Isavia publishes the traffic figures for January 2021 - Keflavik Airport served 22.462 passengers in January 2021, it is 94,02% less than in January last year.
Research and innovation
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An Intelligent Approach to maximising runway efficiency - NATS Blog - Intelligent Approach is a suite of tools that allow air traffic controllers to significantly improve the consistency of spacing between arriving aircraft in order to maximise runway efficiency. The software generates markers between arrivals based on the individual aircraft type so controllers can more readily hit the optimum spacing.
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Is it time to disband the Organised Track Structure? - NATS Blog - The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, analysed around 35,000 flights in both directions between New York and London from 1 December 2019 to 29 February 2020 and concluded that taking better advantage of the winds would have saved around 200 kilometres worth of fuel per flight on average, adding up to a total reduction of 6.7 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions.
UAV and UTM
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GKN Aerospace research centre to demonstrate airspace integration concepts in Future Flight Challenge - Unmanned airspace - This addresses integration of unmanned and autonomous systems evolving at pace, and examines how to integrate autonomous systems in shared airspace in a safe manner.
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SAFIR-Med project to demonstrate medical deliveries in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands - Unmanned airspace - The two-year SESAR Very Large Demonstration (VLD) project – Safe And Flexible IntegRation of advanced U-space services for MEDical air mobility (SAFIR-Med) – launched on 28 January 2021 aims to demonstrate advanced U-space services for drone medical deliveries in Europe.
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SESAR JU kicks off urban air mobility research project GOF 2.0 - Lennuliiklusteeninduse AS - The SESAR JU project “GOF 2.0 Integrated Urban Airspace Validation”, with a consortium of 13 members, will focus on the safe, secure, and sustainable integration of unmanned aerial vehicle and air taxi operations in urban airspace and kicked-off at the end of January.
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GUTMA and GSMA release detailed review of connectivity services needed for drone operations - Unmanned airspace - A joint publication by the Global Unmanned Traffic Management Association (GUTMA) and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) describes the NetworkCoverage Service, a general architecture comprising stakeholders, services, interfaces and data models for the automated data exchange between Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and the Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) ecosystem.
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