FLIGHT DEMONSTRATION OF AN ON-BOARD TACTICAL SEPARATION SYSTEM FOR SMALL AIR TRANSPORT VEHICLES

Small Air Transport (SAT) is emerging as the most suitable transportation means in order to allow efficient travel, in particular for commuters, on a regional range based on the use of small airports. In this framework, the project COAST (Cost Optimized Avionic SysTem), funded by the Clean Sky JU and started in the year 2016, aims to deliver key technology enablers for the affordable cockpit and avionics, including dedicated technology for Tactical Separation decision support to the pilot, i.e. the Tactical Separation System (TSS), designed in the project by CIRA, the Italian Aerospace Research Centre. The TSS is an ADS-B-based self-separation system aimed to extend traffic situational awareness and to provide the pilot with suggested manoeuvres to maintain the required separation minima. It constitutes an enabling technology for implementation of the separation responsibility delegation to the flight segment (self-separation) in the future SESAR environment, in this way supporting the implementation of single pilot operations for Small Aircraft. The TSS receives consolidated traffic picture (position and velocity of all tracks) from the ADS-B receiver and its own position and velocity from the GNSS receiver. Additional surveillance information, if available, can be also sent in input to the TSS, such as TCAS status, if available. Based on this overall information in input, the TSS performs its main assigned functions, i.e. Conflict Detection and Conflict Resolution, as well as additional supporting functions such as for instance Traffic Prioritization. In the paper, a description is reported of the overall TSS architecture and of its concept of operations, while also providing an outline of each functionality implemented in the system (Coarse Filtering, Conflict Detection, Severity Assignment, Conflict Resolution, TSS Logic) and about the dedicated HMI. Then, the test plan implemented in the dedicated real flight test campaign is described (limited to an exemplary test) and, finally, the related results are summarized and discussed, showing the successful validation in real flight tests of the TSS technology.