Autonomous flight infrastructure specialist Neuron is stepping up its alliance with blockchain data group Hedera Hashgraph. The goal: to digitize airspace to support beyond-visual- line-of-sight operations for drones. Following on from extensive trials during 2021, the partners say they will be able to facilitate eVTOL aircraft developers’ plans to operate their vehicles without pilots on board.

In two sets of trials conducted with UK government support, Neuron tapped Hedera’s enterprise-grade public ledger to show how blockchain technology can support its radar system in safely tracking the complex movements of drones flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). Now the partners are exploring how they could support passenger-carrying eVTOL aircraft in piloted and, eventually, autonomous operations. They have held initial discussions with manufacturers including Vertical Aerospace and Hyundai’s new Supernal urban air mobility division.

Using a variety of existing off-the-shelf sensors, Neuron collects data points on each aircraft’s location and direction. The Hedera Consensus Service logs and timestamps the data from each flight and stores it on the Texas-based company’s decentralized public ledger. According to the partners, the Hedera network offers higher data-processing speeds and lower cost per transaction than any publicly distributed ledger system available today, making it very cost-effective to scale for multiple drone and eVTOL operations.

According to Neuron chief commercial officer Niall Greenwood, the industry is long overdue for a fundamentally new approach to air traffic management. “The current approach is broken and isn’t able to integrate unmanned systems into the manned [aircraft] environment,” he told FutureFlight. “The current system involves a mix of World War Two radar and voice communications. Radars are expensive and give a poor performance for the cost in terms of surveillance and the coverage you get.

"Datalinks help for en-route traffic," he continued, "but overall, the current procedures won’t work with increasing traffic, including drones, eVTOL air taxis, and cargo aircraft. We’re looking to solve this problem for beyond- visual-line-of-sight drone operations, and we can do this by digitizing the whole airspace, and not just the lower-level airspace.”

Neuron sees the task of transforming control of all classes of airspace starting in less-crowded areas, as exemplified by last year’s drone trials at Port Montrose in Scotland and at Cranfield University. In addition to the data taken from sensors, such as existing ADS-B transponders, the company sees 5G networks being used to provide a backup means of communication, which it says would provide the additional layers of safety needed for autonomous flights to operate routinely in urban areas, as envisaged by most eVTOL business models.

According to Greenwood, the approach Neuron and Hedera are trialing could also support efforts to increase airspace capacity, which will matter even more if so-called advanced air mobility operations scale up to the degree that their proponents promise. “Given the potential for error in the current ATM system, there have to be large separations between aircraft and with digitization, we can reduce the permitted minima,” he maintained.

Neuron is developing its system to be agnostic regarding what type of sensors are fitted to the various aircraft and says it will work with inexpensive units costing no more than $2,000. This year, the company is looking to develop a larger consortium of partners to advance its plans, with some work possibly being conducted with the support of the UK government-backed Future Flight Challenge.

Greenwood stressed that Hedera’s contribution in providing a secure platform for ATM data through its enterprise-grade public ledger is critical to regulators and the increasingly diverse industry having confidence in the digitization approach. “Having fault-tolerant, immutable data networks will help to ensure that parties remain accountable, and data integrity is preserved,” he concluded. “Without this security backbone in place, flights will need to remain manually supervised by human operators.”

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