Safety-focused framework for enabling UAS traffic management in urban environment

Abstract

While recent emergence of multirotor UAS as a transport option in urban area promises to unlock the vertical dimension and greatly increase the transportation capacity, managing the safety and efficiency of UAS operations in the complex and densely populated very-low altitude urban airspace could be challenging. In particular, the safety case must be made, and accepted, by the urban population for the UTM to be viable. The Aviation Transformation Programme Project 5 (ATP5) under Singapore’s National Research Fund was setup to identify and tackle the challenges for the enabling of UAS operations in highly urbanized airspace and the eventual establishment of urban UTM. The project focuses on the risk assessment for UTM in two directions: the risk of UAS operation to ground population and the risk of UAS operation to other UTM users. This paper describes the approach taken by the Air Traffic Management Research Institute in Singapore to enable the progressive opening up of urban airspace for UAS operations for various level of traffic pattern complexity and demands.