Airspace Control: Challenges and Way Ahead - Indian Defence Review

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• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones for civil and military purposes, is posing a new challenge to airspace control as they are small, carry negligible onboard equipment and are horrendously difficult to track comprehensively.

• UN Convention on International Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention) which dates back to 1944, and had set into motion the formation of International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) as a UN agency in 1947.

• Convention’s first Article recognises that every State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory.

• Civil aviation and military aviation have their own peculiar challenges which get compounded where the two use the same airspace.

• airspace is rendered one continuum to be used optimally by all its users through accommodation of maximum requirements of both.

• commercial (read revenue) considerations while military aviation has the more intangible concept of national security

• confluence thus tends towards tumult and disorderliness.

• Flexible Use of Airspace (FUA)

• the pre-tactical level

• the tactical level

• 2013

• beneficial from the point of view of saving fuel and reducing CO² emissions,

• meeting the military needs as dictated by the rapidly changing nature of air warfare,

• Seamless Skies

• air traffic management over Asian skies and create more efficient traffic flows over Asian airways

• Automatic Dependant Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)

• an aircraft mounted system in which on board equipment automatically broadcasts the precise location of the aircraft

• numbers are alarmingly large

• Vahana (a one-passenger EVTOL platform), Voom (on-demand helicopter booking platform) and City Airbus (a four-passenger EVTOL platform).

• rban Aerial Mobility (UAM), more fancifully referred to as air taxi, is another emerging challeng