Aviation is of paramount importance for the European economy and it is expected a positive trend in air transport growth over the coming years. Therefore, it is urgent to put into place conditions for European citizens to continue using this mean of transport at affordable costs, in complete safety, easily, quickly and sustainably.
In its vision for 2050, the European aeronautics community commits to two parallel objectives: (1) maintaining the position of its aeronautics industry and (2) satisfying citizens needs with an effective, reliable and sustainable air transport system.
In the near future, the demand for air traffic services will not only increase but also will likely shift from scheduled operations towards more unscheduled operations for air taxi, charter, fractional ownership, and on-demand small low-cost aircraft (A/C), with satellite airports around major hubs providing a wide range of flight options for people to fly between their homes and places of business or pleasure. In this perspective, many players of the aviation community are planning to make significant investments in the specific Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems improvements over the next years, to enhance efficiency, safety, capacity and security.
The core of the business plan are Inertial Systems that represent a core component of CNS systems. As mentioned in the introduction, the existing commercial solutions do not present high performances.
Recently, the development of miniaturized vibratory gyros, such as Micro Electro Mechanical Sensors – MEMS, allowed to attain similar level of bias of state of the art systems with reduced cost and resources. Last generation vibrating gyros are adequate to measure the Earth Rate because they can attain bias instability levels better than 1°/hour. However, this limit does not ensure that initial heading is determined with accuracy in the range 1°-0.1° (1σ). This level is needed to perform safe initialization of heading for aircraft.
MAGYCO project addresses the challenges described above and aims at the development of an innovative aerospace grade Inertial Unit based on miniaturized vibratory gyros with autonomous northfinding capabilities that can be used to improve the overall navigation capabilities of General Aviation (GA) aircraft and Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) at affordable costs for the manufacturers.
