2025 Agenda

Higher Airspace Operations (HAO) represent a new frontier for aviation where significant societal benefits can be realized with services including connectivity, earth monitoring, enhanced security, and supersonic transport. Demand for airspace access will grow significantly in the next decade. A wide-ranging diversity of aircraft types, performance characteristics, and mission profiles is expected. Operations will share characteristics of very high levels of automation, atypical and globe spanning multi-month-long flights. The safe, efficient and cost effective deconfliction of these diverse and novel operations requires a innovative, globally harmonized, traffic management framework that can adapt to the varied needs and constraints of each operation in a cross-border environment.

The very low-density stratospheric environment, initially dominated by unoccupied and uncrewed aircraft, provides an ideal environment for the aviation community to safely evolve and validate new digital and highly automated concepts of collaborative traffic management. Our primary objective is the continuous improvement of aviation safety.

The HAPS Alliance collaborated with stakeholders within and beyond the HAPS community, involving other airspace users and regulators, to propose a globally harmonized, cross-border, and integrated approach to HAO Traffic Management.

This presentation details an international vision for HAO, and addresses the diverse needs of global stakeholders including States, ANSPs, defense, industry, and new entrants, while explicitly considering State sovereignty and national security. The proposal introduces solutions capable of delivering global coverage and consistent capabilities, easily deployable to any world region without excessive delays or State-by-State duplication of investment. This vision focuses on 3 key pillars:

• A standardized and cross-border concept for “Cooperative Zones” (CZs), which builds on Eurocontrol’s ECHO and the FAA’s ETM projects, where operations are managed cooperatively.
• An airspace structure concept for flexible and dynamic use of airspace, which supports automated (implicit) Cooperative Zone Management and approval.
• A high-level, federated cross-border architecture of state-authorized digital information exchanges and services that ensures the resiliency of the ecosystem and allows for flexible and scalable solutions to accommodate the diverse needs of HAO operations. The proposed architecture relies on digital authentication, authorization management, and mutual authorization verification frameworks to protect sovereignty, resiliency, and confidentiality in a secure Zero-Trust architecture model.

We conclude with results from the NASA Ames Research Center Collaborative Environment (CE-1) simulation campaign successfully conducted in the summer of 2024 demonstrating this architecture as well as procedures and information exchange requirements associated with sharing vehicle telemetry and operational intent data for HAO. Future collaborative evaluations are planned to include a Discovery and Synchronization Service (DSS) for HAO to enable industry-shared situation awareness.

The HAPS community is global and diverse. The commonalities, however, provide an exclusive opportunity to reshape aviation’s future and design a fully collaborative airspace in a new way using higher levels of automation. The principles advocated in this presentation allow regulators and operators to test this approach in a low-density, lower-risk environment and adjust best practices quickly based on lessons learned.