Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

As the governing body of flight operations in the highly anticipated emergent area of Upper Class E airspace (60,000 ft and above), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has recognized the potential for a possible extensible traffic management system for new entrants into this domain. Following the success with the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) program, the FAA put forth an initial concept of operations for supporting the start of the Upper Class E Traffic Management (ETM). Like UTM, ETM is envisioned to be a community-based, industry-driven cooperative management concept. However, tailoring it to be adaptable to the atmospheric communication, navigation, and surveillance deficits, as well as the diverse vehicle and mission profiles that operate in the ETM environment, will be the challenge.

As such, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center has been investigating several technologies that will help enable industry in the development of this new type of cooperative environment. These technologies are being prototyped and will be tested with ETM industry partners in a collaborative evaluation of an initial ETM system in late 2023. The evaluation will concentrate on building out ETM systemtechnologies that will inform the industry participants regarding operational intent sharing, strategic conflict detection, and the resultant deconfliction process. In addition to the technical aspects, key roles and responsibilities need further definition. This will be done through exploring community-agreed upon Cooperative Operating Practices (COPs) that include procedures and capabilities to aid in timely, strategic conflict identification and resolution to be developed during the evaluation.

As an initial step to the evaluation, the ETM research team at NASA Ames solicited industry feedback on various aspects of ETM operations from these subject matter experts. A virtual tabletop walkthrough session was held over a two-day period to follow a roadmap through the functional steps needed to build COPs, focusing on strategic conflict detection and resolution.

Overall, the ETM tabletop provided insights into how the community wanted to instantiate the generation and sharing of operational intent, detect strategic conflicts, and resolve those conflicts using a preliminary set of community-agreed upon COPs.