City-ATM — Demonstration of Traffic Management in Urban Airspace in case of bridge inspection

The project City-ATM, launched by the German Aerospace Center in January 2018, aims to integrate new airspace users, such as unmanned aerial vehicles or air taxis, into uncontrolled airspace. For this purpose, an air traffic management and traffic flow control concept is developed, which aims at uncontrolled airspace up to 2500ft above ground (today`s airspace G) including urban areas. The status quo of numerous initiatives and regulations at European level is taken into account and integrated into the conceptual work. In addition to airspace and traffic flow management concepts, also a CNS concept (Communication, Navigation and Surveillance) is developed to provide a robust communication, navigation and monitoring infrastructure. Furthermore also technical and operational aspects are considered. Doing so, a CONOPS (Concept of Operations) is defined, prototypically implemented as a basic system, serving as a basis for validation and demonstration of the City ATM concept by means of flight tests. In the development process, the work and trials are also analyzed and evaluated with regard to their risk. Based on the developed concepts, a first demonstration platform for an urban ATM was setup. It is based on the use case “bridge inspection” (as support only partial aspects of a bridge inspection were considered) with several drones in a limited area. With the expertise of the individual stakeholders in the various subject areas, services from the area of flight planning (strategic flight planning and geo-fencing), registration and identification (E-Reg / Ident), tracking and tactical conflict detection were brought together in one test system. In addition, the technical feasibility is always respected. Based on several flight tests, the current system is being tested ongoing and demonstrated in an urban area.