Email Newsletter Repository

We aim to keep our audience and industry peers informed as we develop new research, highlight partnerships, and deploy new products. “Closing the Loop” is an effort to share our learnings as we uncover them with influencers and decision-makers interested in contributing to a feedback loop generating conversation around the future of air traffic management. If you’re interested in staying in the loop, use the button below to subscribe - we also host all our previous memos below for reference anytime.

Airspace Fairness - Jan '20 The future of the commercial drone industry - and the advancement of many new humanitarian and enterprise applications for drone technology - rely upon the safe integration of drones into the airspace.

Autonomous Conflict Avoidance Systems for the Airspace of the Future - Dec '19 In our last memo, we presented the idea of using mathematical models like the Markov Decision Process (MDP) to enable better decision making when faced with complex and uncertain environments, like the increasingly populated airspace.

Solving for Uncertainty: Exploring the Markov Decision Process in Dense Airspace - Dec '19 As humans, when we’re faced with a difficult decision, we try to evaluate the most likely outcomes without introducing an internal bias into the process. Perhaps the most difficult part of this methodology, is that we don’t know how the future is going to unfold, nor do we know precisely what every aspect of the current world looks like.

Airbus UTM Selected By DroneDeploy To Offer UTM Services - Oct '19 Airbus UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management) is pleased to announce DroneDeploy, the leading drone software company, will integrate with Airbus UTM to offer airspace authorization and flight briefings for commercial drone pilots. The integration is an important milestone in Airbus UTM’s charter to provide digital traffic services for the evolving aviation ecosystem.

An Update on Airbus and the Global UTM Association (GUTMA) - Jul '19 At this year’s GUTMA Connected Skies Conference, Airbus joined the organization and a member of the Airbus UTM team, Jessie Mooberry, was elected to the board of directors. We hope our team can use this position over the next year to help GUTMA accomplish several important goals to move the industry forward.

Encounter Aware Flight Planning in the Unmanned Airspace - May '19 To our knowledge, this is the first ever quantitative analysis of flight planning in the context of centralized and federated UTM architectures. In the technical paper we derived new airspace density metrics, examined deconfliction in centralized and federated UTM architectures, and formulated a novel deconfliction algorithm that can perform at the highest levels of safety and efficiency.

Centralization v Federation - Apr '19 In preparation for the release of our technical paper Encounter Aware Flight Planning in the Unmanned Airspace we use this memo to provide an overview of centralized and federated architectural approaches.

Preliminary Community Perception Study - Feb '19 We've found when reading literature or attending events, that there is a shocking lack of input from the general public when it comes to discussions around the deployment of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). We sought to fill this need with our Preliminary Community Perception Study which examines responses from over 1,500 members of the general public around the world.

UTM Transition - Dec '18 We distributed this memo to announce we’re moving from A³ to Airbus Urban Mobility and welcoming Dr. Isabel del Pozo de Poza as the new leader of the Airbus UTM team.

Safeguarding our Future Skies - The Video - Nov '18 In this memo we debut our video on how Airbus UTM will ensure the future safety of our skies.

How Does Risk Influence Airspace Capacity? -Nov '18 To ensure that our Open Risk Framework can effectively anticipate and respond to changes in capacity, we’re conducting a range of studies in our UTM prototype simulator. These studies will help us understand the roles that various airspace management tools and procedures will play in the future with the framework providing a path toward dynamic separation standards based on vehicle equipage and airspace limits including tight feedback loops that may change separation requirements over the course of a flight.

What are the Biggest Factors that Contribute to Risk? - Oct '18 From the sensitivity analysis of our fault trees for a UAV crash or collision, we learned that four broad categories of factors have a strong influence on the probability of a loss of control that results in a crash including maintenance, weather, battery performance, and operator training and experience. This memo dives into those factors and a few more.

How Do We Calculate Risk? - Oct '18 Our second risk briefing focuses on how we developed our flexible open risk framework including our foundational principles for an open framework; how we use fault trees to analyze relationships between threats, errors, and undesired states and; how our framework can complement and extend the SORA framework, especially in real-time operational settings.

The Role of Risk Assessment in UTM - Oct '18 Successful safety risk management for autonomous vehicles in our airspace will require that we extend and evolve our current frameworks, many of which are qualitative and subjective. In this memo we share the first of three risk briefings on the time horizons of risk assessment and how they’re used in UTM.

Post Blueprint: What's Next for Altiscope - Oct '18 In this memo we announce Airbus was approved by the FAA to provide Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) Services as an approved UAS Service Supplier (USS).

Airbus UTM Blueprint Launch - Sep '18 Airbus' UTM Blueprint is Altiscope’s contribution to moving aviation forward. This document lays out the information and the specifications needed to implement an action plan. It is an outline of how we can transform airspace faster for the next generation of aircraft.

Post Different Countries, Similar Approaches…Harmonized Systems - Aug '18 Governments and industry professionals around the world recognize the need for infrastructure change in order to support the vehicle innovations of the future. While these efforts are highly individualized, as each region uses different terminology and structure, their architectures, underlying principles to unmanned traffic management (UTM), and overall approaches are actually very similar. Here we explore UTM systems around the world.

How Many Drones Will a UTM Need to Support? - Aug '18 In this memo, we’re sharing a sneak preview of The Blueprint’s projections in the context of last week's memo highlighting the need for an air traffic management architecture built to be scalable and flexible.

Architecture of a UTM - Aug '18 The memo debut of our design for a modular and scalable UTM service stack. We were inspired by NASA's UTM and SESAR’s U-space architectures which highlight decentralized, coordinated networks of services to safely open airspace to exciting new uses.

Principles of a UTM - Jun '18 The diversity of emerging aircraft demands a new approach to air traffic management in order to deliver the time savings and reduced headache they’re heralding. This memo explores the UTM approach and the principles of this system.

Volume Estimation Tool- Jun '18 We built a tool to streamline the calculations for estimating the volume of drones coming to our skies and shared it with all our subscribers along with instructions for different ways the tool can be used.

Airspace Bands by Heading - May '18 We set up this study to measure the effect on collision rates when autonomous vehicles are assigned altitude based on their direction of flight—easterly moving aircraft at one altitude, westerly moving aircraft at a second altitude

When Drones Fly at Different Speeds and Altitudes - May '18 In this study we tested the effect of airspace configuration on safety specifically on what happens when varying both speed and altitude.

How Many Drones until Big Sky isn't Big Enough? Part II - Jan '18 Once again using our simulation tool we explored traffic over major cities and found that, for a city like Paris, at a rate of 1,000 short urban mobility flights per hour, a collision will occur about 800 times per million flight hours — or at least once a day over Paris alone.

Metrics for Near-Miss Events - Jan '18 There is no publicly available global metric for comparing air traffic safety events in which two aircraft get close enough to one another that a collision was barely avoided. Because our team needed a baseline to use for our studies, we put together a paper laying out the distinctions between three reporting paradigms in an effort to understand how they relate to one another.

How Many Drones until Big Sky isn't Big Enough? Part I - Dec '17 Using our proprietary air traffic simulation tool, we began to model what the airspace would look like with varying traffic types, traffic densities, rules of the road, and conflict avoidance methods. This memo explored our initial results

Closing the Loop - Nov '17 In order for us to realize our mission of accelerating the safe adoption of new aircraft into the airspace, our team is working with decision makers all around the world. Launching our newsletter allows us to interact regularly with these and other groups through the sharing of ideas, research, and surveys