The Viability of Digital Flight, Part 2: Requiring Conflict Management Performance

With automation increasingly permeating nearly all aspects of aircraft design and operation, the need is growing to also automate their safe passage through airspace populated with traffic and other hazards. Today’s operating modes of Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) are human-centric in their methods of conflict management. Their ability to accommodate increasingly autonomous operations is quite limited and may significantly restrain their growth and future operational utility. Creating an additional, digitally enabled operating mode is a paradigm shift that could unlock a new era of aviation in which highly automated aircraft operate cooperatively throughout the airspace alongside conventional (i.e., VFR and IFR) operations.

The NASA Digital Flight concept envisions an additional operating mode that employs automated self-separation and which may be a more appropriate match than VFR or IFR for aircraft capable of increasingly autonomous flight. However, as a significant paradigm shift in conflict management, its viability hinges on the regulator’s ability to authorize its use. The application of accountability, an accepted construct in aviation used as part of safety assurance, helps in addressing this viability question. Accountability is the obligation to answer for an action taken (or not taken) by a responsible entity. Understanding the answers to the following critical accountability questions is necessary for effective oversight by the regulator: who will be accountable for separation; to whom they will be accountable; and for what they will be held accountable. This paper (Part 2) is the second of two that directly investigate these questions. The companion paper (Part 1) introduces these basic questions of accountability and discusses the first two accountability questions (who and to whom) in detail by analyzing an operator-centric scheme similar to VFR, but for automated conflict management (i.e., automated self-separation). This paper (Part 2) discusses the third accountability question (for what) in detail by introducing a new performance construct: Required Conflict Management Performance (RCMP).

RCMP offers a structured approach for (a) authorizing operators to employ automated conflict management as the sole means for separation from traffic and hazards, and (b) specifying the minimum authorized separation value based on their conflict management system performance. The paper discusses RCMP motivations, early community-led foundations of automated conflict management including Unmanned aircraft system Traffic Management (UTM) and Detect and Avoid (DAA) technologies, and the ability for RCMP to fill the “separation provision” gap between them. The paper presents an approach for constructing RCMP, leveraging the precedent of performance-based navigation and new self-separation capabilities proposed in the Digital Flight concept. Multiple systems contributing to automated self-separation are qualitatively discussed for their performance contributions and impacts, and a phased implementation approach to RCMP is discussed.