Safe integration of all air users – beyond electronic conspicuity

Aviation

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is currently consulting on a proposed Electronic Conspicuity (EC) mandate for much of UK aviation below Flight Level 100. In parallel, it is engaging on the future UK Rules of the Air.

Both are important pieces of work. The Shared Airspace Council believes they also raise a wider question:

What is actually required for the safe integration of all air users?

Electronic conspicuity is clearly part of that answer. If another air user can be detected electronically, that can improve awareness and support collision avoidance. The current CAA consultation itself asks whether alternative approaches could achieve the same safety outcomes, as well as seeking evidence on different aircraft and operating environments.

But being electronically visible is not the same as being integrated. Indeed, ‘being integrated’ for an air user should be both a physical and a digital/system truth.

The information must reach the right person or system. It must be sufficiently reliable and timely. The recipient must understand what it means. Where two air users are in conflict, there must also be a predictable way to decide what happens next – action and reaction.

That takes us beyond EC and into Detect and Avoid, ground infrastructure, digital services, Air Traffic Services, operating procedures and, importantly, the Rules of the Air.

The problem also looks very different depending on the users involved. A helicopter, balloon, glider, paraglider, light aircraft, military aircraft and uncrewed aircraft do not have the same speed, manoeuvrability, equipment, operating environment or ability to respond to a developing conflict.

A solution that works well for one pair of users may not work at all for another.

For that reason, the Council is starting to look at integration through five simple questions:

Safe – What level of safety are we trying to achieve, against what existing risk, and who owns that decision?

Integrated – How do different air users know about, understand and respond to each other?

All – Have we accounted for all legitimate air users, including those that a preferred technology may not detect?

Air – Does the solution work in the places where users actually fly, including uncontrolled and low-level airspace?

Users – What does the proposed solution require each user to carry, understand, pay for and do?

This changes the starting point

Rather than begin with a particular technology and ask how every user can be made to fit it, we can begin with the air users themselves and ask what must happen when they encounter one another.

For example: helicopter and drone. Glider and balloon. Paraglider and powered aircraft. Military and civil. Drone and drone.

Can each user detect the other?
Do they understand what the other is likely to do?
Can either communicate or coordinate?
Who can manoeuvre?
Who should give way?
What happens when the normal technical system is unavailable?
Air users aviating with confidence, knowledge, orientation, assurance and resilience.

Some of those interactions already work well. Some rely on long-established Rules of the Air and good airmanship. Others may expose gaps which need technology, procedures, infrastructure or new regulation.

That is why the current Rules of the Air work is demonstrably relevant. Technology can help two users know that each other exists. It does not, on its own, define how they should behave when their paths conflict.

The Council is not arguing against electronic conspicuity. Nor are EC, Detect and Avoid, UAS Traffic Management or ground infrastructure competing answers.

They are components of a wider system. The components are entirely complementary.

The aim must remain the safe integration of all air users through inclusion. The test for any individual policy or technology is therefore not simply whether it works, but whether it helps the overall system achieve that outcome.

That is the wider discussion the Shared Airspace Council will continue to develop.