European standards agency Eurocae has issued a call for participants to WG-14 to work on “recommended practices for testing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) ground segment equipment to environmental conditions”. The new document will identify relevant ground environmental conditions and associated test procedures for equipment as per existing international standards.
ED-14/DO-160 Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Airborne equipment are available and widely used by the aviation community. However, currently the document only deals with environmental conditions and test procedures for airborne equipment.
According to Eurocae, as technology evolves, and UAS are integrated in commercial applications, it is considered necessary to review existing environmental conditions and qualification standards for the surface-based equipment and analyse the applicability to UAS ground segment equipment.
WG-14 will work in close collaboration with EUROCAE WG-105 to rapidly develop a document that provides the industry recommendation on how the environments and associated procedures prescribed into the existing ground equipment related standards, or others if needed, may be used to certify equipment installed in UAS ground segment environments for certified category, with particular attention for IFR systems inserted in ATC.
Two types of ground station will be addressed at first step: Permanent, that is to say typically system installation spread inside a building, and deployable, meaning mainly system installation concentrated into one or several shelters. For all cases, the associated external installation, such as antennas and closely located systems such as amplifier, will also be addressed.
The start of this new activity within WG-14 is planned early 2021 immediately after confirmation that a relevant task force will be available. The way of working is typically planned as one meeting, still virtual, every two months, with homework for participants in between. A significant work has been done by WG-14 in the past two years which will pave the way for a quick start and should allow achievement of the deliverable in due time at the end of 2021.
At a second step, in 2022, the group should extend its activity to other category of UAS such as specific, and other applications such as Shipborne, handheld etc. In that perspective the group should simultaneously collaborate with RTCA SC-135 in updating DO-380 “Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Ground Equipment”, making it a joint RTCA/EUROCAE
document.
For additional information please contact: sergui.marzac@eurocae.net
Registration form: https://eurocae.typeform.com/to/L4tPSoCi
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