COLLARIS - UAS in civil protection - air traffic management challenges

While there are a high number of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) solutions that have already achieved technical maturity, today only a relatively small fraction of available capabilities are used operationally for rescue and crisis management.
Today effective use of UAS is limited mainly by legal and organisational obstacles and not by the pace of technology development. Implementation of air traffic management solutions enabling safe UAS flights will be the most significant factor increasing their use for rescue and crisis management.

The purpose of this document is to identify air traffic management challenges that need to be addressed in a systemic manner to enable the optimal use of UAS for civil protection needs. Among civil protection practitioners there is a recognised necessity for the more effective communicating of civil protection needs to SESAR Joint Undertaking and EASA – institutions responsible for definition of current and future air traffic management.

The discussion between civil protection, aviation authorities and air traffic management institutions should result in developing the optimal model of UAS crisis operations. The model needs to enable optimal exploitation of both human-operated aviation and UAS systems capabilities, while minimising impact on normal air activities and remaining compatible with current and future logic of air traffic management architecture. This document may be used to define initial scope of such discussions.

The following four main challenges have been identified:
• Introduction of “blue light flights” priority.
• Enabling rapidly initiated blue light priority BVLOS flights.
• Ability of ATM systems to rapidly establish air traffic restrictions.
• Definition of ATM arrangements permitting simultaneous safe and coordinated flights of both human-operated aviation and UAS.

Two additional issues worth consideration are:
• Provision of risk information affecting U-space flights (crisis management entities - U-space)
• Provision of information from overflying vehicles to emergency services (support to 112)