INTRODUCTION

A widely shared commitment to integrate “remotely piloted aircraft systems” (RPAS) into the European airspace has been building up for several years. Such a development in aviation operations must be supported by the demonstration that RPAS meet the current safety requirement and do not decrease the current safety levels.

Several initiatives aimed to achieve this integration of RPAS are progressing rapidly and in parallel but their coordination is loose. This is a source of concern in the light of the need for consistency, standardisation and interoperability, especially in a critical domain like Command, Control and ATC Communications (C3).

There is a need now for documents which will lay the foundations for a common understanding shared by all stakeholders, whatever their technical knowledge of C3, in order to clearly understand the issues and to help scoping and identifying solutions. This C3 CONOPS for RPAS is designed to share a unified vision of these RPAS functions all across EUROCAE and other RPAS working groups:

- It proposes typologies to be used in the standardisation process in many domains related to C3, including the assessments of C3 scenarios (e.g. C2 datalink loss) and connecting RPAS C3 systems and RPAS operations;

- It is an input for ED-78A artefacts such as the Operational Services and Environment Definition (OSED) and subsequent documents (such as the Safety, Performance and Interoperability Requirements, SPR and INTEROP) which will be used for specifying RPAS C3 MASPS;

- It aims to describe the contextual and physical landscape of RPAS C3 regardless of the technical solutions which could be deployed.

In this document, the term RPAS is preferable to “unmanned aircraft systems” (UAS). This semantic choice aims at explicitly stating that the aircraft is indeed flying with a human taking the decisions, especially those related to the trajectory management and the interaction with the other aircraft users and the Air Traffic Control (ATC). In other words a human pilot is capable of exercising all the responsibilities and meeting all the obligations as required by the (international) aviation authorities, as is the case with manned aviation.

This aspect highlights the importance of the C2 datalink between the Remote Pilot (RPIL) and the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) which carries the intents and orders of the RPIL to the RPA and the feed backs from the RPA to the RPIL.

This CONOPS applies to the operations of RPAS in non-segregated, controlled and uncontrolled airspace by any civil operator (private or commercial).

It serves as an input for further standardisation and regulatory work on RPAS C3.