Survey of Certifiable Air Data Systems for Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

In the near future, vertical take off and landing aircraft of the urban air mobility sector will be integrated into the civil airspace and they will be characterised by several levels of autonomous flying capabilities. Many countries worldwide are funding several researches to identify and develop enabling technologies to make urban air mobility as safe as modern aviation. One of the most critical aspect of those aeroplanes rely on the reduced fuselage dimensions and available space on board to welcome all those safety critical systems commonly used on commercial aviation. The air data system is one of the safety critical system that is equipped with several probes and vanes, protruding externally from the aircraft fuselage, and some of its functionalities are adequately redundant for general aviation and large aeroplanes. Even though an airworthiness standard applicable to urban air mobility is not ready yet, worldwide there are several efforts that will lead to type certification standards in next years. This work presents a brief survey of certified technologies available for sensing solutions feeding air data systems and solutions based on synthetic sensors certifiable in a couple of years. The survey relies on certified and certifiable innovative data sensing units for realistic urban air mobility applications. To this aim, a safety assessment analysis is presented in order to support the validity of the certifiable air data sensing solutions presented in this paper