Modernising air traffic management — ATM, to the experts — is both massively complex and massively important: for reducing aircraft emissions, to make more efficient use of increasingly crowded skies, to enable the new generation of uncrewed and automated aircraft, and to improve safety.
Expanding on its Iris air traffic modernisation in Europe, in partnership with the European Space Agency and SESAR, Inmarsat is now working aboard the Alaska Airlines-branded Boeing 737 MAX 9 2021 ecoDemonstrator to bring next-generation ATM to the US.
We sat down with Inmarsat’s John Broughton, senior vice president for aircraft operations and safety services, and Danny Bharj, director of aviation technical programme, to learn more about how this kind of next-gen ATM works.
Iris is essentially a live, satellite-based system that tracks aircraft in latitude, longitude, altitude and time, enabling strategic planning and monitoring of individual aircraft and the users of an airspace as a whole with what’s known as trajectory-based operations.
“The technology behind it,” says Broughton, “is an evolution of our L-band safety services product, our new safety services product we call SwiftBroadband. It’s basically an evolution of the sorts of technologies that we’ve been using for oceanic air traffic operations since about the mid 1990s.”
Swiftbroadband-Safety is roughly half a decade old, and uses the comparatively light L-band antennas and systems that the data demands from consumer electronics rapidly outpaced. During the period where airlines still offered L-band to passengers, the joke among connected travellers was that Swiftbroadband was neither swift, nor broadband.
For passengers, L-band has largely been replaced by faster and broader Ku-band connectivity such as that from Gogo (now part of Intelsat) Panasonic Avionics, or Anuvu (formerly Global Eagle) and later Ka-band (primarily from Viasat and Inmarsat). L-band is now, by and large, used for safety services including flight tracking.
Beyond SwiftBroadband-Safety, Inmarsat’s Broughton says, Iris offers “additional performance factors which are necessary when you’re dealing with the with the much more crowded, much more time sensitive continental airspace operations, but also, crucially, to add the security overlays, which are increasingly becoming the focus of a lot of attention in the aviation world.”
In essence, Inmarsat has put the flight deck data and voice communications behind a secure VPN, isolating it from other operational data and cabin communications.
The driver, says Bharj, was “primarily as a result of some threat assessment that was conducted between Airbus and ourselves.”
Iris enables ATM to move beyond SIDs and STARs for specific departures and arrivals — early trajectory-based operations — to a situation where, essentially, the entire flight is trajectory-based.
“You’re looking at the same ends: moving the aeroplane most efficiently from A to B, reducing the delays, particularly at the lower altitudes, which use up fuel and generate a real big carbon hit,” Broughton explains. “The big target there is doing that in the dynamic environment of the changes of weather, the day-to-day changes in air traffic, and individual impacts of what a particular aeroplane is doing.”
Iris is expected to roll out within Europe by 2023 and then to the rest of the world over the next decade, with future prospects bright — but subject to wider avionics progress.
“From from past history, the way these things roll out, in fact, has a lot more to do with the evolution of other aircraft avionics, than it does with SATCOM,” Broughton says.
Beyond that, work including ATN/IPS, including IPv6, is looking to 2025 and beyond.
Fundamentally, though, the future seems to be less about specifying a particular band for safety and ATM usage, but rather to a band-agnosticism and performance-based regulatory framework. Less “use system X”, more “your system must do A, B and C”.
“The day is going to come when the operation of safety services becomes less attached to a particular frequency band,” Broughton predicts, forecasting an end to the L vs Ku vs Ka debate. “But again, as we know, in this space, it can take a while for those things to evolve. It took years before the basic SATCOM technology capability of the early 90s was actually adapted and standardised for use.”
“In the long term the industry will eventually make the provision of safety services agnostic to the frequency band,” Broughton concludes. “It will be the ultimate implementation of performance based communication standards — where, over time, the industry has moved away from specifying specific ways of doing something to specifying the performance of that something, and the regulatory bodies have given industry then more scope to evolve and to adapt.“
Author: John Walton
Published: 7th October 2021
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