The Higher Airspace extends the interface region between Air Traffic Management (ATM) and Space Traffic Management (STM), which have to interact with each other to accommodate an increased number of spacecraft during their flights through regular airspace. The diversity of operating modes in the Higher Airspace region poses a challenge for an efficient management of flights while ensuring operational safety at all times. The mission profiles and technical requirements for the vehicles deployed in this environment will make it difficult to rely on established standards and processes. New, yet reliable and interoperable procedures, traffic management techniques, communication methods and monitoring tools are needed.
The ambition is to develop a comprehensive, innovative and feasible ConOps for HAO enabling near term and future operations in a safe and orderly manner including safe and efficient interactions with Air Traffic Management and Space Traffic Management.
Many current SESAR solutions are targeted for the human centric ATM system and are constrained by global legacy implementations (e.g. airborne equipment) and related complex transition strategies. The Higher Airspace including the operators forms a new, almost legacy-free environment enabling an expeditious uptake of innovations or, extrapolated SESAR solutions. In this way the Higher Airspace could become an incubator environment for future ATM. Whereas the Higher Airspace is sovereign airspace, the provision of HAO Traffic Management, should be at pan-European level interfacing with surrounding regions. This is ground breaking and part of the ambition for this project.
The ECHO project will provide a significant step forward towards achieving international approvals and opening up operations across Europe, providing world recognition in discussions with global actors, such as the FAA, and help to support European industry which faces increasing competition from the US and China. This project adopts a holistic approach and is designing a concept that for the first time takes into account all operational participants in the Higher Airspace region. This includes the necessary interfaces to ATM and STM and considers their further development as they are designed for ATM in the SESAR ATM Master Plan. The design goes beyond the state of the art by extrapolating the demand development for different scenarios up to 2040. It will consider current vehicle concepts as well as development of technologies and services in the coming decades.
The project is a key enabler for the economic development of various commercial concepts that will only be possible by using the Higher Airspace environment. Current obstacles to access relevant altitudes and uncertainties regarding the requirements for future users of this airspace will be removed. Moreover, the expected growth of interest in access and use of Higher Airspace and the partly conflicting interests of the different types of users can be mitigated by the operational concept to be developed.
