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

Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) is building digital air traffic management solutions for the next age of aviation. Airbus designs, develops and builds the infrastructure necessary to allow existing aircraft to continue operating in lower airspace and to permit future vehicles, including delivery drones and air taxis, to safely enter and share airspace in the future.

Unmanned Traffic Management

Joint airspace management for safe future airspace

The lower airspace of the future will be populated with familiar helicopters, but also with futuristic aircraft 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 believes UTM is a fundamental enabler of an integrated, accessible airspace that will support a wide range of new vehicles and operations.
 

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.

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