A Quantitative Approach to Air Traffic Safety at Very Low Levels

Abstract

A safe integration of drone operations at very low levels, especially for beyond visual line-of-sight operations, must come with proper modeling of the mid-air collision risk at lower altitudes. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art quantitative model for the air risk assessment of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operations and illustrate how cooperative technologies such ADS-B and FLARM, together with networks of compatible ground receivers, are crucial to provide the traffic data required to support this model. An application over an area of Southeastern France is presented. The results suggest that the collected traffic data allow accurate analyses of the spatial and temporal variation of traffic types and density at lower altitudes, and can thus support an objective assessment of the risk of collision of UAS with manned traffic.

Keywords

• ADS-B
• FLARM
• General Aviation
• UAS
• air traffic
• flight safety