What is the added value of being a member of the SESAR JU?

By being a member of the SESAR JU, Collins Aerospace has an opportunity to foster innovation by collaborating and partnering with customers and suppliers throughout the ATM value chain, including ANSPs, airlines, aircraft OEMs and systems providers. Our objective is to develop innovative, mission-centric connectivity and digital solutions that will enable the modernization of European Air Traffic Management. SESAR 3 is the right forum to co-develop future ATM solutions with European stakeholders, as it provides Collins Aerospace the opportunity to engage in high-impact research and technology activities, involving our Applied Research & Technology, Avionics and Connected Aviation Solutions organizations as well as support the journey towards a sustainable and digitally transformative European ATM.

Why is air traffic management and its digital transformation important to Collins Aerospace?

Collins Aerospace is targeting the development of new technologies in critical areas such as U-space, trajectory based operations (TBO), airport solutions, autonomy and data services. These technologies are strong contributors to the digital transformation of the ATM Industry. Being part of SESAR JU gives us the opportunity to contribute our expertise to the digital transformation of the European ATM landscape and collaborate with European stakeholders across the value chain.

What are Collins Aerospace’s top three innovation priorities?

In the context of the SESAR JU, Collins Aerospace has 3 innovation priorities:

1. Sustainability. Our focus will be on Trajectory Optimisation. The next generation ATM services must automatically negotiate the most optimised trajectories, while considering the needs of other decision-making stakeholders (Airlines, ANSPs, NM). Our vision is to develop a Machine To Machine (M2M) system leveraging the existing ATM communication backbones (SWIM, FF-ICE, Future Communication Infrastructure).
2. Data Driven operations for more predictable operations: 
   • SESAR will enable Collins to enhance its data and AI-driven capabilities in the ATM Data Services Provider (ADSP) domain. ADSP is an emerging area in the European ATM domain and is one of the key R&I activities that add value to Collins’ existing data platform and services business (FlightAware, ARINC ADX).
   • More predictable operations also means giving any involved stakeholder the opportunity to access high quality data. 
3. More Autonomous Systems: This critical and complex domain is divided into two main threads of activities: 1) reduced crew operations (RCO) / single pilot operations (SPO) and 2) Uncrewed aviation.

We also put a strong focus on the transverse domains of security technologies, which are already under development at Collins Aerospace. 

In which flagships of the Digital European Sky programme is Collins Aerospace particularly interested in getting involved, and why?

One of the flagships of particular interest to Collins Aerospace is “Connected and automated ATM”. This is a critical area for the company where we can provide immediate value-add R&D contributions to realise the automation and connectivity vision of the European ATM Master Plan. Topics of focus for us at Collins include integrated performance-based Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS), resilient Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and hyper-connectivity to reduce costs while improving performance of ATM services. Underlying these focus areas is the need for resilient and secure connectivity combined with advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. We believe progress in all these areas is needed to enable a smarter and more sustainable air transport that is connected and accessible to airspace users.