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BirdCom

Competitiveness & Growth
STATUS | Ongoing
STATUS DATE | 19/06/2008
ACTIVITY CODE |

PAGE CONTENTS

Objectives

This project has as objective the development and integration of an airborne user terminal based on satcom, navigation and computing commercial modules. The target market is the ultra-light aviation segment made up of aircraft owners and operators. The terminal will be tested in a real airborne environment with the application software needed for new services provisioning. The space segments is GLOBALSTAR.

The produced terminal could also prepare the ground for applications dedicated to the general and commercial aviation market and for employment of other space segments in the airborne environment.







The availability of the ultra-light flight environment enables this development at a fraction of the cost of the same development in the commercial aviation environment.


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The business of service provisioning for UL aviation is entirely new and our preliminary analysis shows high potential and user community expectations. The proposed services enhance safety and introduce very useful features that are also lacking in the commercial aviation sector.


The main services that will be prototyped and tested in the project are:






  • On-line and off-line maps and information,

  • Airfields near present position and operational status,

  • Traffic information,

  • Meteo information (text and/or graphics),

  • Services available at airports and operational status (fuel, restoration, car transportation, etc.),

  • Black Box Telemetry,

  • Eme

    Challenges

    The Birdcom architecture, based on these services provisioning and telecommunications, allocates Birdcom in a completely new market segment, compared to commercial GPS navigators based on local maps.

    This market segment is the provisioning of near-real time location based services for aviation, including ATC. The sub-segment target of the Birdcom system is UL flight.

    A similar evolution is on the way for car navigation and personal navigation in metropolitan areas, where UMTS allows fast on-line location of commercial services, as restaurants and shops, with map real time transmission. The new UMTS terminals contain a GPS for these services.

    Plan

    The Design and Development Plan will illustrate the logical execution of the activities from contract award to final review.


    The Design and Development Plan is summarised as follows:



    WP 1: Program definition
    WP 2: User Terminal design and implementation
    WP 3: User terminal Globalstar modem adaptation
    WP 4: System ground integration
    WP 5: Application and Service Centre design and test implementation
    WP 6: Aircraft integration
    WP 7: Pilot Trials

    Current Status

    The project has been successfully concluded in November 2005.

    The pilot trials were based on a flight activity of about 70 hours. The goal of the tests were mainly designed to assess system effectiveness in terms of VFR (Visual Flight Rules) navigation.

    The excellent quality of NAV data has been successfully verified.

    The Man Machine Interface (MMI) has been refined and tested following the indications of professional pilots, in particular regarding usability and effectiveness of:

    • 3D corridors

    • 3D airspaces (ATZ, TMA, CTR)

    • 3D corridor for runway approach

    • Formats used for visualization (buttons, status bars, etc.)

    • Display selection ergonomics (pointing devices)

    • Digital messaging to/from ground.
    The Birdcom project has been successfully presented in several air shows and exhibitions. As an added value, the terminal open architecture will allow fast adaptations and improvement, first of all the upgrading to the Galileo navigation system.