Unmanned traffic management

Building the safe airspace of the future

Unmanned traffic solutions for the safe entry of drones and future air taxis into the lower airspace.

Planning for tomorrow’s skies

SEAMLESS OPERATIONS

Airbus Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) is building digital air traffic management solutions for the next age of aviation. Airbus UTM teams design, develop and build the enabling infrastructure necessary to allow existing aircraft to continue operating in lower airspace and future vehicles, including delivery drones and air taxis, to safely enter and share our future skies.

Unmanned Traffic Management

Joint airspace management for safe future airspace

In the future, we will see not hundreds but thousands of aircraft populating our lower airspace, including traditional helicopters and new entrants such as delivery drones and air taxis, also known as electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs).

To safely manage all these air vehicles our joint airspace will need a scalable approach to air traffic management (ATM).

Airbus’ Unmanned Traffic Management believes UTM is a fundamental enabler to digitise ATM and realise the vision of an integrated, accessible airspace supporting a wide range of new vehicles and operations globally.

AirbusUTM-Suburban-Centra-Bright

The Airbus UTM teams work to:

  • Determine the safest, most effective architecture for unmanned traffic management through research, simulation and industry collaboration.
  • Tap into Airbus’ decades-long history of technological excellence in aviation and expand on the already-established relationships with the regulatory and industry organisations critical to successfully deploying a comprehensive unmanned traffic management framework.
  • Collaborate with regulators, manufacturers, service providers and mobility end users to establish a common understanding of tomorrow’s airspace.
  • Deploy UTM services for flight authorisation and authoritative data using Airbus’ safe and secure UTM Platform.
  • Provide customers with design and analysis support to help them to evaluate safe practices, understand current airspace usage, analyse risk and propose new airspace structures.

The 6 core principles to Airbus UTM deployment

Scalable

The ability to support UTM functions at scale: whether the various operations that UTM must provide can reasonably be built using an accompanying digital platform.

Safe

The platform must be able to enable a reliable UTM system that is available for safe operation at scale, and that allows the holistic design of failure handling across the system.

Secure

The platform must be sufficiently secure for safe operation. High assurance development, authorization and authentication, and defence in depth mechanisms must be supported.

Future-proof

​The platform must support future vehicles, missions, and systems. The world is changing rapidly and we must design a system which can support this.

Interoperable

Defining standards and regulatory frameworks that drive interoperability are critical to ensuring overall efficiency and safety of UTM deployments.

Sustainable

UTM functions are a critical component of the future airspace ecosystem, and will unlock operational efficiencies and enable new vehicle types to operate safely and sustainably.

The 4 main pillars to Airbus’ UTM approach

The Airbus UTM main pillars are grounded in the domains of digital services, the development of an airspace digital twin, the building of enabling digital platforms and research and analysis.

Digital services

Airbus UTM digital services provide authoritative data and information services to customers and external partners and ensure the safety and efficiency of the global airspace.

Airspace digital twin

The airspace digital twin allows for verification and validation of a concept of operations document, data and technologies to prepare for safety critical use cases.

Digital platform

The platform introduces digitisation into the global airspace and allows a high level of security, reliability and performance for customers and external partners.

Research and analysis

Research work into connectivity, safety, fairness and testing at the Airbus UTM lab provides the crucial intelligence for standardisation and regulations.

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