Flight trial demonstration of increased general aviation and rotorcraft operations supported by GNSS solutions

Abstract

The project GRADE has received funding from the SESAR Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 783170 under European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. The operational scope of one of the project’s exercises was to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of executing SESAR 1 solution Sol#113, which covered the demonstration of Standard Point In Space (PinS) helicopter procedures as well as low level IFR routes for helicopters. In addition, it was demonstrated that the PinS procedure can be conducted independently from approaching fixed wing traffic, resulting in a Simultaneous Non-Interfering (SNI) operation. For guiding the pilot along the planned flight route, different display formats of a primary flight display, navigation display, and tunnel-in-the-sky guidance display were customized and finally tested on a head-down display on DLR’s HubSim simulator in the scope of a real-time simulation. The results of this campaign were already presented on 45th European Rotorcraft Conference in Warsaw. Following up on the outlook given at that conference, this subsequent paper describes the results of the flight tests that were carried out from 20th August until 18th September 2019