Advanced Weather Awareness System for Small Air Transport vehicles: design advancements in the COAST project

Abstract

Abstract It is well known that, in the aviation sector, flights are strongly influenced by weather conditions, especially considering small aircrafts. This kind of vehicles, ideal for transportation on regional base, are having an increasing importance in the last decades. In the framework of the COAST (Cost Optimized Avionics SysTem) project, funded by Clean Sky 2, several key technologies are under development for the affordable cockpit and avionics in the area of small aircrafts. One of these technologies is AWAS (Advanced Weather Awareness System), devoted to increase the weather awareness of the pilots, providing on board information concerning monitoring and forecasting of weather hazards having not negligible potential impact on the aircrafts. AWAS technology is composed by two applications, namely AWAS on-ground and AWAS on-board, connected each other via a satellite link. The AWAS on-ground is the core of the entire system, devoted to provide on-board synthetic information concerning the weather hazards detected or forecast over an area defined according to the aircraft position. The weather information is extracted from the geodatabase of MATISSE (Meteorological AviaTIon Supporting SystEm), a prototype software developed by the Meteorology Laboratory of CIRA, in which weather data coming from different sources are stored. The AWAS on-board application, instead, is devoted to provide on-ground the required input information (such as the aircraft position). Moreover, it decodes the data received by the on-ground application and allows the visualization of weather information in the cockpit by means of a Human Machine Interface specifically designed for the project. In this work, the main features of the AWAS system are presented, along with the future activities to be carried out in the COAST project.