# Defining the Future of Traffic Management with UTM Architectures - Event: NestGen ’24 - Published: March 29, 2024 - Length: 29:36 - Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/zuXefH2LWY8/ > The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's > captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms. ## About this session The session explores the critical role of Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) in managing air traffic operations amidst the increasing reliance on drones and aircraft. Led by Chris, an industry expert with extensive experience, the session delves into UTM's evolution, challenges, and benefits. Topics include integrating diverse stakeholders, UTM architectures, and the concept of Extensible Traffic Management. Emphasizing cooperation, standards, and performance monitoring, the session highlights UTM's potential to revolutionize airspace management. To know more, visit: ===== Subscribe to FlytBase YouTube - Follow Us On - LinkedIn - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - ## Transcript **[0:20]** hello hello and welcome to one of the most anticipated sessions of the day I hope you've been enjoying the rest of the S sessions at NES gen learning more about BV loss regulations about air traffic management about docking station deployments and now uh in the track that is boss Tech enablers we have the session called defining the future of traffic management with UTM architectures UTM or uncr traffic management is a traffic management ecosystem for air traffic operations in a world increasingly reliant on aircrafts and drones for a variety of applications the need for sophisticated scalable and secure traffic management solution s have never been more crucial Chris has over 20 years of experience in the airspace industry and 16 years of working with analytical graphics and airspace software company he's had various roles at the company from system engineer to uh account executive with a focus on scheduling communication system in 2014 Chris co-founded **[1:26]** one sky as a subsidiary of analytical Graphics Incorporated to focus on UTM Solutions Chris manages business relationships for one sky and is responsible for customer outre and Industry engagement he works with various organizations such as GMA ASM IC ausi uh small UAV Coalition Etc to understand the state-ofthe-art in drone technology and to keep us updated on the Revolutionary progress Chris also has a bachelor's degree in airspace engineering from Virginia Tech he's also commercially rated multi-engine aircraft pilot it's great to have you Chris um and I'm very excited myself to learn about UTM and how they're you know how they're going to be so crucial as uh autonomous aircrafts and uh drones become more and more popular now uh just before we jump in uh a few housekeeping rules for um our audience uh you may use the Q&A section for your questions so on the right side of your screen you have the Q&A tab where you can put **[2:29]** up all your question questions and at the end of the presentation uh Chris would be happy to take those up the session is being recorded and will be published on uh flight based TV and on social media platform so you can check it out um you can also visit one sky system booth in the Expo section later next um if you like something if you found something insightful please do not forget to share your uh learnings or uh you know your experiences on LinkedIn use the hashtag nesg and tagf FlytBase uh top three posts will receive a special hamper uh from nesg then last but not the least I would like to thank our sponsors for their unwavering support throughout this event title sponsor DJ Enterprise and goal sponsor sunflower Labs with this I'll will hand it over to Chris and hi G thank you um and I apologize in advance if there's some back ground noise **[3:30]** I'm in the airport I'm flying back from Singapore where I attended the Singapore Air Show this this past week which was excellent and uh was good to see some of the colleagues there so uh thank you for joining I put my email in the uh chat if you want to follow up with me afterwards and today I want to talk about um UTM architectures and how they're the future of traffic management um so we already talked about my background um I'm also a commercial pilot I've been flying for about 29 years and I think that's interesting um to have that background in the UTM industry because a lot of times the uh crude aircraft and the unmanned aircraft sort of uh um don't see themselves the same and they're not they're not um going down the same path but I think that we need to think about them in the same context and think about integrating um these two types of uh aircraft into the same you know infrastructure next slide so one of the things that's very different from the air traffic management **[4:32]** industry is the amount of stakeholders that we see in the unmanned traffic side so um the stakeholders at low altitude are people like the local law enforcement the communities that you know you don't want to fly over jails or schools or Parks uh military operations that might not be integrated they're not using adsv for example um helicopter rescue missions uh there's a lot of low altitude instructions environmental data that different to lowlevel altitude um weather so all these things are different from air traffic management and so we have to think a bit more cooperatively and how do we integrate all these Cooperative data providers into one system and so that is what UTM is uh many people think UTM is something that you can buy that is just one system and it's not it is a um it's a a system of data and um and participants and stakeholders and the real focus is on standards do we all uh talk a common language because without standards it makes this problem very **[5:35]** very challenging um but I think that is one of the the hardest things is how to adopt standards um next slide uh so there's a new term called xtm which is extensible traffic management and extensibility is sort of a common theme Here how do we um move beyond what uh is typically at is is a certified system used by air traffic control uh it's based on broadcast um uh traffic information so like adsb or radar uh transponders and fairly closed um and we need to move into something that's a little bit more open networked um maybe based on trust so how do you verify the data that you have um and then multi-stakeholder so how many different stakeholders um can plug into an ATM system and also multi-domain so thinking from UTM to air taxi to e ATM **[6:37]** which is high altitude or traffic management um so extensibility is key and this xtm concept kind of defines that and UTM is really the the key to xtm next next slide so these are different domains that we think about in in you know xtm so UTM is low level below 400 feet it's based on Cooperative tracking because we don't have tracking systems to see drones so we need to share position information through a network um and we want to operate anywhere so anywhere we don't have infrastructure everywhere we have to operate with network systems um to make that available and it's generally outside of air traffic control so uh they don't want to tell a small drone to turn left or right or or land um they basically Define airspace where you can't fly so it's really more airspace management than it is traffic management and as you move up you know you move into UAM that's more integrated th000 to 3,000 ft **[7:37]** uh these aircraft might have adsb they might have transponders and be integrated into the air traffic control U but they're operating between vert ports and those vert ports um may have corridors that connect them to enhance the traffic flow between them so one of the keys in UAM that I think about is uh predictability because the endurance of these vehicles is very low uh we need to make sure that when they take off they have a place to land and they're not being put in a holding pattern and so corridors allow for that predictability so UAM allows us to look at the integrated picture but think more about traffic flow and then there's etm so ATM is the the high e above 60,000 ft and um what we're thinking about there is very long duration flights so you have ptit toe airships that could fly for months or years and the flight plan uh doesn't really stop right it just keeps going so we have to think about how do we um keep modifying flight plans as these aircraft keep **[8:38]** keep moving along so those are the the three different kind of uh domains that we're thinking about for UTM technology um and then above that is space traffic management which I'm not really covering so next slide so we have some polls throughout the presentation and the first one is I wanted to understand how should we integrate new Advanced Air mobilities uh Vehicles into various airspace domains um so you can go through the poll yeah is live in the PO section on the right so I would request everyone to just go to the poll section and answer this poll G do we want to stay on the poll or move through the slides and then come back to the poll yeah yeah okay uh next slide so UTM basically overcomes some air traffic management shortfalls for Advanced Air mobility and these are really in these you know kind of four different uh areas one is where we need to have operators provide um their **[9:42]** Cooperative traffic management information because we don't have systems to attract them at low altitude or in different domains you know etm at high altitude um where we have high volume operations and we need predictability um so we have different deconfliction concepts in UTM strategic deconfliction versus a tactical kind of deconfliction um even in the uat and we have things that are called like demand capacity based operations where we uh we measure the amount of traffic going into a corridor so we don't push everything in at the same time and cause problems um we rely on third party data it's performance driven um it's checked you know it's monitored and and it's um not always certified data so it's not purchased or uh provided by the ANP which is important and then lastly I think uh security so because these are network systems there are Advanced security capabilities that you can put on the data um first of all we're operating you know in htps protocols uh we **[10:46]** can authenticate different users and you only see what you need to so instead of broadcast systems we can control who sees the data and when when they see the data and you don't always see another traffic um object if uh if it's not a secur if it's not a safety threat right so that's some that's some security that's there that might that might be good for things like military operations next slide uh so it's based on this UTM architecture uh you've probably seen this slide before but I want to make a point here that um the UTM could be more centralized or Federated and centralized meaning thep would control the back end of it who can be on that Network or it could be provided by the industry which is um sort of how we're we're anticipating this being rolled out in the US and we have a network of different stakeholders that are interacting on the UTM Network on their own um I think this is a good point that when stakeholders want to interact in UTM all they **[11:50]** need to do is adopt the ASM standard if you're a law enforcement and you want to reach in and get information on uas traffic uh if you use the as standard you can get into the network and understand that if you're an operator you can send in a flight plan or a flight track um and if you're a military you can pull those tracks out and know where they are so you don't you don't have a safety issue so anybody that wants to operate in the utam environment if they just uh use the standard it's very easy for them to to be on the network because it's not one system it's a it's it's a um it's a standard standard based environment uh next slide uh second poll so I'm wondering uh from you guys should we rely on all aviators to share position information this is um an interesting topic because in many places the incumbent the general aviation or the crude uh aviators don't always have transponders they don't have the technology that that drones or automated aircraft **[12:51]** have and so it's easy for us to share information we actually have to because we have remote pilots and we need to know where the drones are but with a VFR rules and smaller aircraft they don't always have transponders and that's been the biggest um issue in terms of us being able to fly at altitude is is seeing those other aircraft so if everybody were to share position information it might make it easier for us to fly next slide I have another poll I guess this is uh should airspace restrictions be managed by a single entity like air traffic control or other stakeholders at a local level um need control as well so when we're down at low level you know the community becomes more important where drones are flying over Parks they become more of a security or safety uh concern and so it may be out of the scope of air traffic control and um I'm just wondering what people think about airspace uh management and **[13:52]** and how that should be done you know in this future traffic management system uh next slide so just to show a little bit about how Cooperative tracking works you have um any C2 method really from from the Drone to the ground control system so if you're using satellite if you're using LTE if you're using pointto point doesn't matter to the UTM you know once you get your information at the ground control system over the Telemetry link that's when it it is sent to the UTM so we want to send in the intent which is the flight plan or the region flight and then uh you register that intent in the network and and so that's what I'm showing in these boxes is uh you know it's a box drawn around your your flight plan so you don't have to share the entire Flight Plan you just share the region that you're operating and if those two regions overlap then you have to share more information you should talk and say well do I flight plans uh intersect right and if they don't then you don't have to share any **[14:53]** information you're safe so the idea of privacy is built into the UTM it allows you to share information only when needed um and it makes it much easier to deal with uh so you're only sharing little bits of information to ensure everybody's flying safe um there's also the idea of airspace management which is shared as a constraint so many people can provide you know constraints to the UTM environment as well and uh the Drone traffic can avoid those constraints if they're tied into the to the UTM um so that's basically the the simplified UTM kind of concept uh next slide and here's some service examples so uh we have system performance information down on the left you could have things like weather or uh GPS navigational accuracy performance you could have adsb performance or Communication System performance uh and those are all uh services that can be brought in through UTM and and supplied to the different **[15:53]** operators um you can have separation management so that's a service that allows us to operate safely and keep us away from other drones and then airspace awareness services so all the different people that might Supply airspace to the network uh next slide all right and then just to wrap it up so why why UTM so it's not a single system but a Cooperative approach so the idea of UTM is to enhance cooperation let's make sure that all stakeholder needs are met and we do that using a single standard that everybody can adopt um so it enables more than just Air Traffic Control stakeholders to control airspace we have lowlevel Community adoption U we're encouraging electronic consu which is that idea that everybody can participate in traffic management by supplying their own track position and their own uh flight intent uh and so that's more of an I an idea that people need to agree upon than it **[16:55]** is a technology issue what UTM does is it allows it to to be done at lower cost so you don't have to buy a device you can just register your intent through the internet for your flight you can do it in advance and then all drones would stay away from you um and then the last one is performance monitoring to enhance you know the the third party Data Trust so all the data that's in the UTM is um is monitored and and we make sure that it's safe to use for operations that concludes the presentation um we can go back to the polls I guess if you want to look at that quick cheet or uh or you can just go to the questions however you want to address that yeah I think uh let's start with the poll so I think the first one was how should we integrate new am Vehicles into various airspace domains and let's see what the audience has answered so there are nine votes for allow for flexibility and use an open network to share information like adsb and LT and then uh there are three words for Let ATC handle it they are experts **[17:58]** at what they do we don't need a new approach and then there are two words for ensure all operators can use a a common capability like adsb in all domains yeah so I think it it it looks like most people think that there should be some flexibility and and the network allows us to do that um but they're you know ATC are experts at what they do and I think integrating uh some sort of flexibility into the ATC system is the right approach probably all right thanks Chris let's move on to the next poll so should we rely on all aviators to share position information uh so let's see what our audience has answered um so there are six V for uh there needs to be a balance let's share information when needed for safety then there are uh other like 30% votes are for everyone should be required to share track data at all times and then the least amount of votes are for privacy is really important to me I don't think anyone should be forced to share data okay so most people are thinking that **[19:02]** conspicuity is good and that we should share information most people think there should be a balance yeah and um I think we can reach that balance with UTM when we we understand we can share information only when when we need to that also helps with the military when they don't have adsb and they don't always want to share information so they can they can share it just when they need to for safety right yeah I think the next B was should airspace restrictions be managed by a single entity like ATC or do we or do other stakeholders at a local level like military or police need control as well let's see what audience has answered so there are 63.6% votes for uh the second one that is more than just ATC and then the 36% votes for ATC only I didn't hear the answer but uh say it again yeah so like there are 63.6% votes for more than just **[20:02]** ATC the B option most I actually thought that would be higher than um more than just ATC but I think that um maybe we're hearing that some people think ATC should be a um sort of an authority over airspace regulation or restrictions so if you're a military or if you're police maybe using ATC as the authority to put that restriction in so that might be something that they could do through the UTM is to enable the constraint if it's even if it's supplied by somebody else it could be enabled by ATC oh great okay thanks for participating in the poll that was really interesting and uh we can move over to Q&A I guess um I'll let you handle it g which which ones you want to um pull out if you I just go to the Q&A section if you still want to you know ask any questions for Chris just put it up in the Q&A section so um Chris let's start with this question uh it says with the drones increasing in the airspace and with many more to come should **[21:03]** governments develop a drone Centric flight Control Authority wherein they have a visual aid over which area is a drone being performing operations so I think this is more around you know the as we spoke about having a central ATC Authority or yeah Chris you can I think that the idea of low-level um um guess lowlevel air traffic management is really airspace management so the idea is you're you're not actually controlling a drone so when you have when you say drone Centric flight control um I don't know that we we control the flight but we control where they should be and where they shouldn't be and I think that comes to the last question is who puts in the constraints for where drone should and shouldn't be that could be controlled by air traffic control but I think the information should come from multiple stakeholders that know more about that information so like cities they know about where sporting events are and what sporting event start times and end times are they know that better than air traffic control so why not let them send the information into the central Authority but you **[22:06]** know if you want the authority to actually make the the rule to make the constraint they could do that as well I think the ASM standard though gives a really great approach to making temporary flight restrictions where the existing notm system is is really troubled in trying to do that it's based on non-structured data and ATM is structured and uh ASM is is much more um easy to use for a temporary flight restriction right I hope that answers your question um then there's a question from Rasmus Rasmus has asked what's what's the largest challenge in the standardization of UTM use space today I so I think there are a couple things first of of all is the infrastructure based on the country and and what's been uh put in place so if you're in the US for example you have a large infrastructure of adsb based on a tower system we're also using 1090 and uh and uat frequencies for adsb if you go to um place like Japan you **[23:06]** don't have much adsb at all and then if you go to Canada you have adsb based on satellite uh you know so you have different concepts for how you get information so that's challenging um but I think the real issue with standards is just adoption so I mean coming to consensus is a hard hard thing and we've been working inm for a long time to help get consensus um but you know I don't think that we expect Perfection if you look at the world we still have the metric system right as opposed to um English system um and you know people walking on the left or the right side of the road so it's hard to even standardized day-to-day you know functions but what is troubling to me is when I go to a country and I see them um you know make bespoke Integrations between uh an operator and air traffic control and if they would just use the estm standard uh then that work doesn't need to be redone every time you have a new operator so I guess if I had one point here today it would be um you know **[24:07]** for everyone pay attention to what the standard is it's very basic and it allows everybody to communicate and um once you can do that then I think we really are making a difference with you know lowlevel traffic management right on a on a similar uh on a similar lines there was another question if there are any technical challenges uh at the moment for UTM platforms yeah technical challenges I think uh yeah I think from the the Drone operator integration perspective that that's always a little of a challenge because everybody wants to use a different Ground Control System sometimes they use their own um but it's not a a huge challenge usually we can integrate them into the UTM within a day or two um so so there's that I think um maybe the other one is just getting the information we need Beyond strategic deconfliction to address the Tactical side so if we had crude aircraft uh flying into the low-level airspace how do we see them so electronic conspicuity is a huge issue but that's more of a **[25:08]** regulatory thing um technically it might be how do we include them uh you know in the in the low-level picture uh do we have adsb Portables that we build or uh can we integrate LTE tracker devices into UTM but we need to enforce that over regulation or we need to just let them know that um they use these devices if crude aircraft use these devices at low altitude then they will be seen and and avoided by the Drone got it um there's a question David is asking uh how should the appro approval process go for instance it can be time sensitive do you see this changing in the future uh I think the approval process that we're talking about is for for a drone flight approval yeah and you know like in in the US they have the lance system for flight flights using part 107 but they're visual line of sight only so uh they've done some work to automate that and it really has been beneficial where you can get an automated approval to fly and then they expand that based on um how how they get **[26:11]** comfortable with people flying at night or flying you know in certain areas U they have shielded operations now that are um that are pretty easy to to get approval for um I know what we've done in our system is we have a rule-based um approach to approval so uh and any air navigation service provider or civil aviation Authority can set up the rules in advance and then the flight goes through those rules and it says you know yeah you can or or no you can't fly so um I think um each country will be different but if you have a a generic set of um rules and you have an automated rule-based approach that might be a good way to set up set up the approach but I do believe it should be automated um there's a question um I think this will be the last question we take uh I don't see any other questions how are UTM different from adsb sensors they both work to help perform safer flight operations right kindly suggest what's the best I'm a drone Enthusiast and therefore have less knowledge so yeah I know it's a **[27:15]** really good question so adsb you know is based on GPS and uh when we get information from a UTM uh we're usually getting it from GPS on board the Drone right so and sometimes you have two you have adsb on the Drone and you have a a GPS tracker that's used for flying in the in the autopilot um and there's been studies even of comparing the two and making sure that you know they're both on the same accuracy um adsb is more of a broadcast system where uh what we're doing in UTM is more of a network system so the Telemetry data that comes down from the Drone is the operator's data and I think that might be the main difference is the operator knows where the Drone is at all times probably better than the adsb system them because that's based on uh something else having to receive the information versus the command and control system but I think they work hand inand and I think that they can um help validate each other so I think the use of adsb and UTM is a really good approach got it I think with this we come to the end of the Q&A section um Chris **[28:20]** thanks a lot for the session um I personally found it quite informative I hope the rest of the audience enjoyed this as well learned about UTM also like new terms am xtm all of these things um and um there are a few more sessions left uh for uh tonight before we wrap up n gen so I would uh you know I would really hope you are enjoying all the sessions and uh you will also find find rest of the sessions quite insightful we have a few panel discussions coming up as well um also if you really enjoyed the L experience you should also check out nen Community which we have launched today so along with experts and all the you know people in the industry there would be a community of people who are you know progressing towards this one goal which is to you know really have this level of drone autonomy um where everything is well integrated and safe for flights so I would really recommend all **[29:22]** of you to navigate to the chat section and click on the link for the community and yeah thanks a lot everyone for tuning in today thanks for I appreciate it thanks Chris have a great day bye