Switzerland’s FOCA has received 40 expressions of interest from U-space service providers (USSPs) to provide U-space traffic management services in Switzerland (https://www.unmannedairspace.info/uncategorized/swiss-aviation-authority-invites-expressions-of-interest-for-provision-of-u-space-services-in-switzerland/) “This signals the interest is there in this market”, according to Larissa Haas, Policy coordinator Strategy and Innovation unit at FOCA.
“But we need some sort of automated system to support the certification process – you can’t scale up a manual certification or testing process so we are engaged within the private/public partnerships within U-space implementation, with Skyguide and other companies to develop an automated testing framework to enable USSP to test their services and enable continuous oversight from a regulatory point of view, to improve service delivery and compliance with the existing regulation”
From FOCA’s viewpoint the toughest certification challenge is in the onboarding process (see below) of USSPs.
“Once a USSP is certified by the competent authority to provide services throughout Europe… you will need to have some agreement in place between the different USSPs to have this interoperable exchange of data and to make sure they comply to the standards and know which data they need to share. We set up with SUSI different agreements to make sure we have this coordination among the different USSPs and other U-space/airspace actors.”
From the service provision point of view FOCA has tested the flight authorisation service and finished automated testing with remote ID service in August last year. It has nearly finished setting up an automated system to test geo-awareness and then will develop another conformance monitoring system, the final part of the certification process.
