General Aviation accounts for about 5% of the total civil aviation revenues in Europe, and involve about 8% of the civil aviation job posts (AOPA Germany). General Aviation shows a wide range of uses from private and business travels to commercial on demand transport, leisure, sport, training, law enforcement, fire-fighting, medical services, agriculture, parcel service, aerial work and others. All these sectors and the society can benefit from the improvements coming from the project activities.
The GRADE project performed demonstrations of GNSS technologies and SNI operations in General Aviation and rotorcraft activities. The flight trials produced data and sound results that can be used to support regulation, standardization and certification needs. Outcomes of the project comprehend performance measures, safety assessments and human performance evaluations. System performance are expressed in terms of navigation precision of satellite based position system. Safety is assessed in terms of reliability of the proposed solutions, as well as in terms of capacity to manage non-nominal and failure conditions. Human performance measures apply to workload and situational awareness of both pilot and air traffic controllers. In further details, procedures and technologies demonstrated within this project allow:
• providing more accurate positioning of the aircraft during the approach and geometrical vertical guidance during the final approach segment;
• increasing the pilots’ situational awareness both in lateral and vertical plane, the overall navigational and terrain awareness, thus reducing the risk of Controlled Flight Into Terrain events;
• reducing the approach minima with respect to conventional NPA procedures, consequently enabling successful approaches in conditions that may otherwise cause delay, diversion or cancellation;
• increasing flexibility in planning arrival paths in terminal airspace.
All these achievement can be obtained without requiring significant changes to the current on-ground infrastructure.
The performance improvements demonstrated within the project will contribute to:
• Improve safety and airport accessibility of General Aviation and rotorcraft to regional and small non-instrumented airports, large airports not equipped with the ILS system, and major ILS equipped airports (for GA and rotorcraft not equipped with ILS airborne devices).
• Ease the integration of General Aviation and rotorcraft with commercial aviation into airports airspace, by reducing the runway occupancy times and spacing between arrival aircraft without negatively affecting safety and human performance, and displacing IFR rotorcraft from active runways, while allowing an easier way to manage both traffic flows fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft.
