Collins Showcases Vision for Common ATC Platform

While FAA and Department of Transportation officials outline a vision for evolving the air traffic control systems to a connected, common platform, Collins Aerospace is developing technologies that could provide a glimpse of what that might look like. Company executives did not say whether the RTX subsidiary has submitted to the FAA’s request for information (RFI) on a common automation platform (CAP), but they did showcase their own AutoTrac common platform that can provide a foundation for an array of connected air traffic management capabilities.

The FAA in November released its RFI for a potential CAP that will replace legacy equipment, combining systems such as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) and Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS) into a unified system. Congress provided the agency with $12.5 billion to rapidly move forward with modernization, but that money primarily will update existing systems. Agency officials maintain that they will need closer to $31 billion to conduct such a massive overhaul involving a CAP.

Collins has already secured a key piece of the modernization, a contract to replace current radars with “modern, commercially available” surveillance radar installations. But at the same time, it is developing other capabilities, including its AutoTrac common platform and a multi-function controller workstation.

Layer Cake

Cedric Vigil, Collins Aerospace associate director of program management, likened the Collins platform to a layer cake. The hardware base provides an open architecture that powers a range of applications. There is a middle layer, the platform that is situated atop the hardware, which Vigil called the glue to link the hardware and software. Software serves as the top layer, providing capabilities from terminal operations to oceanic and en-route operations. The system can also accommodate other applications, such as weather mapping. Customers can select the capabilities they want for the system.

Altogether, the system can combine functions that are currently handled separately, and it can be modified over time to add new, yet unforeseen capabilities. Pointing to the en route, approach control, and oceanic functions, Vigil said, “Domestically, those things are separate stovepipe systems. Those are their own programs, and they are programs that deliver bottom to top, meaning from the processing hardware all the way…to the capability sets that are in front of them.”

This makes changes cumbersome and slow, requiring the entire technology to be reset and undergo a recertification process for any modification or update. “If you have two million lines of code and you change 1,000 lines of code, you have to take the entire system back through a set of changes. That’s because it’s in what we’ll call a monolithic structure.”

With a common platform, the idea is to take sets of stovepipes that sit next to each other and fold them into layers that can be managed, acquired, and tested separately, he explained. “The power of that is that as you start with the hardware, instead of today, for instance, where you have different sets of hardware per system, you can now, as a customer, take and expand your hardware across the enterprise and then have a software platform that sits on top of it.”

Customers can manage the software capabilities separately without needing to take down the entire system. They can just address the lines of code in question. This is not only time-effective but also cost-effective, he added. In many cases, processors running the software currently have much more capability than needed, but the customer still has to pay for all of that capability. “There’s no other way to do it.”

Also, with the different software capabilities, a customer may need to find a different vendor for each aspect and require separate hardware. “You have to create your own architectures and your own interfaces as a customer to translate between them,” making the system complex to manage. Under a common platform, this can be folded in atop the same hardware. “All of these capabilities [are] running on the same platform.” 

These capabilities would be interconnected, enabling controllers to have visibility into a seamless National Airspace System rather than their individual sectors. “That doesn’t mean that each controller in each area needs to have this full set of information. A terminal controller doesn’t necessarily need to know what’s happening directly on surface management,” he added. “It does mean that…the terminal is a window into the total system as opposed to being a representation of just one segment of the system. The user can say what capability do I need? What is it that I want to see?”

Users can then ask for what they want to see instead of being constrained by the capabilities of the system given to them. “Ultimately, our hope is that as these systems progress, the user no longer needs to worry about the technology. They only worry about the capability they need,” Vigil said.

Such a system can unlock potential for tapping into data and creating tools for predictability and other insights that could be useful to controllers or airlines, such as “What types of things happen in different congestion situations?”

Going to MARS

In the ATC tower, pulling all of this together for the air traffic controllers is a new Collins workstation, the Multi-Platform Application Re-Hosting Solution, or MARS, that can consolidate air traffic management. With MARS, up to 10 applications could be visible on one or two monitors rather than being spaced out among several monitors. Collins said the touchscreen technology was designed with extensive input from potential operators. It is hardware agnostic, capable of marrying up with existing equipment or new options.

As for the common platform, Vigil maintained that this is not about solving today’s needs but putting infrastructure in place that can evolve as the airspace becomes more complex. “We have more entrances, and frankly, there’s going to be things that none of us have currently anticipated.”

To that end, Collins has already trialed the technology with an international air navigation service provider (ANSP). Vigil, who was not disclosing the customer, said this was an unexpected application, scaled for lower-altitude operations. Under this test, the system runs around how uncrewed aircraft system traffic management (UTM) is approached.

Rather than having UTM operations staged within a corridor and within defined flight paths, this would instead provide a public picture of what is available and essentially provide “keep-out” zones. “The challenge [with the current system] is that it severely constrains the airspace that's available for UTM applications,” Vigil said, explaining that with the Collins application, it effectively provides a more flexible dynamic picture of the airspace available to UTM operators.

The creation of this involved a relatively small set of code, and the ANSP could quickly integrate it on its platform. “Rather than it being a multi-year process to be able to build an entire capability stack up, within three months we generated this, provided it to them, and they were able to go forward with their regulator through their process.”

Collins has long worked with international and domestic providers. Nathan Boelkins, president of avionics for Collins Aerospace, estimated that Collins manages about two-thirds of the airspace globally. In the U.S. alone, RTX has been involved in 140 STARS installations that cover about 800 towers and about 3,000 positions. It has also installed some 550 radars.

As for the radar contract, Collins was one of two contractors tasked with replacing up to 612 radars by June 2028. Valuing its portion at $438 million, Collins is supplying its Condor Mk3, a cooperative secondary surveillance radar capable of communicating directly with aircraft transponders, along with the ASR-XM, the primary, non-cooperative radar that detects aircraft using reflected signals that will scan airspace regardless of whether there is a transponder on board the aircraft. 

The new radar will have capabilities to reduce clutter in the airspace that may give false signals to air traffic control, such as interference from windmills or 5G signals. The radar was also to “future-proof” to accommodate future technologies, said Nicole White, Collins Aerospace v-p and general manager of connected aviation.

White noted the long history the company has had with radar and said that experience has built the knowledge and expertise on large-scale deployment. Further, it has bolstered confidence in its ability to meet the FAA’s timelines.

Both radar systems have met FAA surveillance requirements through prior test site certification activities. “All of last year, a lot of what we did was operational tests and evaluation,” she said, adding that this has laid the groundwork for the speed of installation. Meeting these timelines is critical in the modernization program because lawmakers have already insisted that they need to see results from the initial tranche of $12.5 billion allocated toward new technologies before supporting the remaining $18 billion-plus that the FAA seeks.

Setting the Stage

The CAP and radars are part of rapidly evolving technologies under the Collins Aerospace Avionics group that combines the traditional Rockwell Collins avionics business with RTX’s legacy air traffic control business and FlightAware into a roughly $30 billion business. The group has continued to evolve since Raytheon acquired Collins Aerospace in 2018, and the three pieces—avionics, ATC technologies, and data—are now working together to lay the groundwork for the future of navigation.

For instance, Boelkins noted that FlightAware has provided a deep resource of operational data to offer insights on various scenarios and choke points that it can explore as it develops the technologies. The legacy Collins avionics expertise provides another view of this to offer a complete picture of the airspace from the cockpit to the tower. Boelkins estimated that some 60,000 flight decks have some sort of Collins technology aboard.

This combination has set the stage for the group to develop systems that are adaptable to growth in air traffic and meet the demands for rapid change, he maintained, and added that the timing of this is critical.

“Predictions are anywhere between the next decade and 15 years, traffic’s going to double,” he said. “And then on top of it, I would say something that none of us can predict is where the unmanned and drone situation is going and how quickly is that going to explode…And so that is the rally cry for why we need change.”