LDACS for Single Piloted Aircraft Operations

Kurzfassung

A single-piloted aircraft is more than just an intermediate step on the path from traditional manned aviation towards unmanned aviation. The absence of a co-pilot onboard helps reducing operating costs, while the aircraft design and processes on board are not heavily affected. Two concepts are currently discussed in the area of single piloted aircraft: the "virtual co-pilot" and the "remote co-pilot". The first concept describes a set of "smart" onboard devices, that supports the human pilot in everyday or even potentially hazardous situations. The second concept proposes to still relay on a human co-pilot, that is not onboard the aircraft, but in a control center on the ground and takes over the tasks of the traditional co-pilot. It is obvious, that both concepts require the reliable exchange of information between aircraft and ground through use of a capable data link. New safety- and time-critical applications are required to assist single-piloted aircraft operations. These applications are utilized to either feed the virtual co-pilot with important information from ground or to let the remote co-pilot get in close contact with the pilot to assist him in controlling and safely operating the aircraft. In the extreme, when the single pilot onboard the aircraft is unable to operate the aircraft, e.g. because of a medical issue, remote aircraft operations can be performed via the available data link. With that, the availability of a reliable and capable data link plays an important role for the introduction of single-piloted aircraft operations. The L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS) is the upcoming digital data link for manned aviation providing high data rate, low-latency communications including service priorities, cyber-security and digital voice transmission. LDACS is in a late development state and is already under standardization within ICAO. LDACS demonstrator equipment has been tested successfully in lab measurements and in flight trials. In this paper, we propose to consider LDACS for single-piloted aircraft operations. More specific, we propose to broaden the application range of LDACS to not only cover current air-traffic management communications but also single-pilot aircraft operations. We collect requirements on data link performance for single-piloted aircraft operations and evaluate the LDACS capabilities against these requirements.