Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management: A comparsion on the FAA UTM and the European CORUS ConOps based on U-space

Abstract

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) offer a variety of new business use cases and opportunities, such as inspection of industrial sites, surveillance of sensitive areas and delivery of packages and medical supplies. Thus more and more industry leaders implement UAS for their business case. Additionally a variety of companies offer numerous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) services, e.g. crop inspection. Nowadays most UAV operations are flown in Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) of the UAV pilot keeping the operations very local and enabling pilots to sufficiently oversee the air risk of their operation. However, a growing number of business use cases will require UAV operations Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). To address this evolving development the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) NextGen Office has recently published a new Concept of Operations (ConOps) for UAS Traffic Management (UTM), referred to in this paper as “FAA ConOps”. The FAA ConOps is on the one hand reflecting the continued maturation of UAS. On the other hand it is addressing the need of a unified concept for operating UAVs in both controlled and uncontrolled airspace. Similarly, the European Union within the SESAR project CORUS has released in September 2019 the European-wide Concept of Operations for UAS targeting an UTM concept called U-space, referred to in this paper as “CORUS ConOps”. Although the results of CORUS are project findings in an early stage a fair amount of them already found their way into the new EASA draft opinion that regulate the overall aviation safety within Europe. Most likely future EASA regulations will adopt even more CORUS findings and build on the work done in this project. The rising demand for BVLOS operations requires new regulations for the safe integration of UAS in existing airspace. Both ConOps put their focus on the very low level (VLL) airspace initially. Nevertheless, already the height above ground of this VLL airspace is defined differently. In addition, both concepts differ in the definition of drone operation classes: They are explicitly mentioned in the CORUS ConOps, whereas the FAA ConOps distinguishes between VLOS and BVLOS operations as well as manned aviation. Though, both concepts have in common that they rely heavily on an at-all-times accessible distributed information network for the coordination of airspace use by UAVs in order to not deplete ATC capacities. In this paper a comparison of the FAA ConOps and the CORUS ConOps has been conducted with a main focus on airspace structures, services for UAV and operators, contingency and emergency procedures, airspace access, UAS performance requirements for certain airspaces and operations, actors and responsibilities, remote ID requirements and separation procedures. Particularly, the differences of these main topics are explained and, where applicable, the advantages and disadvantages of individual regulations and procedures are elaborated. In conclusion, the paper closes by expressing the authors' opinion on certain key elements of the concepts, hereby highlighting main differences in order to illustrate potentially neglected aspects in each of the concepts and highlighting different high-level approaches between the FAA ConOps and CORUS ConOps.