German Aerospace Congress 2009

The German Aerospace Congress is organised annually by DGLR, the German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics. This year it took place at the Eurogress Conference Centre in Aachen, Germany, from September 8 to 10, 2009.

On the second day of the conference, DLR presented the AT-One paper on Virtual Block Control and Separation Bubbles. In contrast to the paper presented at ICNS 2009 in Arlington, this paper had a focus on evaluation of the concepts in cockpit simulator trials.

The conference sessions were generally set up with a broad range of topics so that there were not too many presentations directly focussing on ATM. Some of the presentations were mere descriptions of work approaches and used facilities, but they were nonetheless interesting. The sessions I attended described new approaches to avionics and control systems, especially for small private aircraft, knowledge management, simulator development, data analysis, and last but not least ATM.

A very interesting presentation from one of my AT-One colleagues described a revolutionary approach to controlling aircraft, referred to as sectorless ATM. In that scenario several tactical controllers share one giant airspace sector and control or rather guide a number of aircraft (between 3 to 8) through that sector. Although the concept still has some weaker points (controller communication, priority rules) it is an interesting starting point for innovative research in that area.

ICNS 2009 - Integrated Communications Navigation and Surveillance Conference

In May this year I attended the ICNS conference that took place in Arlington, Virginia. It was organised by IEEE/AESS together with AIAA/DATC, the FAA, the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) and NASA at the Crystal City hotel district.

The main topic of the conference was NextGen, of course. One of the opening presentations had a look at the 2009 NextGen Implementation Plan, which can be found here. The plan currently acts as communication medium between the FAA and the aviation community on NextGen equipage thereby answering the requirements set by the national airspace system (NAS) enterprise architecture (EA). Such dialogue will be critical for achieving benefits and return on investment for both the community and the government. The document tries to answer what NextGen will look like in the mid-term from 2012 to 2018, what benefits it will deliver, what the aircraft avionics equipage needs are through 2018, what FAA is committed to deploy in the near-term and what activities are underway to support future capabilities.

The conference agenda was composed of plenary sessions that were set-up like theatre play type of interviews with a certain panel at centre stage. The sessions addressed the three main topics of the conference, namely NextGen, Net-centric Operations, and Trajectory Based Operations (TBO).

NLR presented the results of their project on Virtual Block Control and Separation Bubbles. For the complete programme and the paper presentations, the ICNS website can be consulted.