Highways and skyways

Today’s aviation regulation is highly mature, having evolved over the best part of a century. It is built around highly familiar closed routes between airport security checkpoints, managed primarily by human operators and ground-based systems, to facilitate primarily fixed-wing aircraft flying long distances.

Regulation is formally managed by a range of national bodies, standards are agreed and well understood at the international level, and the Air Traffic Management infrastructure is owned and operated by central national monopolies. This is a human-centred industry, with pilots and controllers communicating by voice.

The current model of airspace management has been successful in controlling the existing air traffic comprising of manned fixed wing aircrafts and helicopters. However, with proliferation of aerial vehicles in the sky and with the introduction of a new generation of unmanned vehicles, it is unlikely that the existing model would suffice.

Emerging airspace infrastructure will need to accommodate a host of new aircraft and journey types, as well as consumer segments, all of which are being developed at breakneck speed by a vibrant and so far generously-funded private sector. Vehicle numbers are set to explode as light, electric aircraft compete with current inter and intra city mobility options, making totally new demands on regulators and necessitating a new reliance on voiceless, computer-based systems.

The challenges posed by new aviation concepts such as drone delivery and air taxis are highly complex and distinct from those of traditional aviation, implying a greater range of customer types, as well as a far greater volume of aerial traffic in urban environments, flying much more closely to the built environment. Most of the new vehicles will necessarily occupy lower tiers of airspace and land in a wider variety of sites, whilst traffic regulation systems will be cloud and software-based, with distributed ownership, making cybersecurity far more complex.

The management of risk in aviation is therefore migrating from system-based security based on a known and bound system, to collective and distributed security based on multiple dynamic operational concepts and environments. This cannot happen overnight. Today’s regulatory environment has been built around traditional aviation, meaning that its rules and procedures often impinge upon the development of new business models.

National air traffic control services often have jurisdiction over the entire upper airspace of a country from border to border, confining experimental concepts to ‘uncontrolled’ airspace, in small volumes and close to the ground. 

Often, even this low-lying airspace has restrictions that hamper innovation. In London, for instance, helicopters are subject to an Air Traffic Control (ATC) clearance and are required to fly along designated routes – restrictions that would make the development of, say, an air taxi service, difficult.

To address the limitations of existing airspace infrastructure, the industry needs to move towards either making the entire airspace controlled or to encourage the use of navigation instruments for each vehicle. These changes would facilitate the transition to beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations.

Regulators in all jurisdictions find themselves under significant pressure to respond to the challenges of next generation aviation, and accordingly we see a wide range of activity around the world. Globally, there are vastly different levels of ambition when it comes to new aviation adoption.

The options that regulators have to deal with now are fundamental questions that will shape the viability of the industry. Those finding the optimum mix will be leaders in the industry, being able to export infrastructure abroad (analogous to the standard railway sizes / construction). Our paper outlines six key questions that regulators will have to consider. 

Building the governance and control frameworks for the aerial mobility of this century will be a collaborative enterprise, requiring the input of multiple stakeholders, each with overlapping interests:

Stakeholders from government, regulators and local authorities to customers, investors and have differing drivers and concerns. The future of aviation promises to be radically different from its recent past, and the regulatory software that will control it must be incubated today, on the same frenetic timeline as the much-hyped hardware of vertiports, drivetrains and vehicles. This will require unprecedented collaboration between the industry’s many competing interests, as well as rapid evolution at the organizational and conceptual levels. There are also major decisions to be made about the shape and structure of the emerging aviation ecosystem, and the level of public / private involvement in achieving it.

 Our report looks at these concerns and makes a number of observations for these groups.