The road to future communications, navigation and surveillance operations will not include any major technology upheavals in user requirements before 2020, according to projected roadmaps presented at ICAO’s Air Navigation Conference in Montreal recently. In fact, new technologies mentioned for each of the three regimes were usually described in terms of their potential future benefits, with no suggestion of their actual readiness for implementation. There was just one proposed mandate (by Russia, for Glonass GNSS equipage in Russian-registered aircraft) and one Eurocontrol mention of a possibly desirable mandate for broader use of current advanced FMS in future performance-based terminal procedures.
In the communications segment, the major challenge is capacity, as always. Datalink and protocols under development for the Internet, but with appropriate high security safeguards, could offer significant amelioration in the future. In navigation, GNSS is clearly established as aviation’s standard for many years to come, with four ICAO-compatible globe-girdling systems–from the U.S., Russia, Europe and China–expected to be fully operational by 2020, plus two equivalent regional systems (from India and Japan) by the same date.
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