Accurate and safe positioning to power the airspace revolution

Aircraft, drones and e-VTOL to grow air traffic

The most recent years have seen the growth of three trends: aviation automation (such as automatic landing), fast growth of drone usage and regulation as well as the upcoming electric vertical take-off and landing (e-VTOL) aircraft for urban air mobility.

These cumulated trends clearly indicate a growing number of aircraft will share the airspace in the next decade, with various level of automation. These will require new levels of safety and as a consequence the need to locate every aircraft in real-time with high accuracy and integrity in the three dimensions.

In the last decade satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS) such as WAAS (North America), Egnos (Europe) or QZSS (Japan) have laid the ground for more precise and safer aircraft positioning, however these systems are regional by nature and their accuracy is not sub-metric.