Digital Airspace Twin

Outside of the pandemic period, total global flight operations have remained relatively stable, generally growing by a few percentage points yearly. New airports and aircraft are planned many years in advance and the general cadence of technological advances in ATM can be measured in years, sometimes decades. This is changing. The introduction and pace of investment in new aircraft including eVTOL and unmanned drones could see a more than 10x rise in commercial daily flight operations by the end of the decade.

The implementation of a digital twin typically involves replicating the constituent parts of a complex system in a virtual environment. Digital twins are used today in everything from building maintenance to aircraft design and manufacturing. The value of digital twins for organizations ranges from improving productivity and performance to enhancing business outcomes; fundamentally, a digital twin provides an organization with a cohesive platform to interact with and manage with complexity.

Each single flight operation is the tip of an iceberg that includes airspace design, control and management schemes, regulatory oversight, human in the loop separation and advisory and hundreds of different sub-systems and sensors. Each function has evolved and been refined over several generations in collaboration with many different aviation stakeholders.

For ANSPs, efficiently managing the day-to-day operations of today’s flight volume can be a challenge – a future airspace with more than 10x the traffic and complexity can be a daunting prospect. For an ANSP, a digital airspace twin will not only help optimize today’s operation but create an innovation platform for the airspace of tomorrow.