Certiflight Kick-off meeting
November 23, 2022
What is Certiflight
On Novemeber 23, 2022 took place the Kick-Off Meeting that marks the official start of the Certifilght “Certified E-GNSS remote tracking of drone and aircraft flights” project, a 30-month Innovation Action that aims to develop and test a digital service for the generation of certified reports of flight tracks and the flight logs of UAS and GA aircraft, especially for safety-critical and commercially valuable applications.
The service will also be included in the USSP/UTM service provider’s software as commercial Recording Service. In addition, the recorded tracks may be useful for law enforcement, for instance sanctions for airspace infringement, as well as for possible accident or incident investigations.
The core of the system is a Digital EGNSS/IoT Device installed on UAS and General Aviation manned aircraft, equipped with an OSNMA Galileo/EGNOS enabled receiver, capable to guarantee the authenticity of their position information at the origin, without the possibility to be counterfeited or spoofed. Tracking information is encrypted and once transmitted to the Certiflight platform is permanently stored by automation software to an unalterable blockchain private node.
The CERTIFLIGHT project represents a very exciting challenge, as its aim is to ensure the “chain of trust” of information generated by drones and leisure aircrafts accessing the U-space airspace that it is expected to become very congested in the next years. With the advent of drones as mass-market and professional-market phenomenon, in the Open and Specific Categories, it is important to ensure that the related tracking data generated are trustful enough to be used both as payment mechanisms (for example, a trustful tracking system can be used as billing mechanism for Clients and UAS operators for charging drones’ missions based on the effective hours of flight) and trustful logging system. For this reason, CERTIFLIGHT aims at filling this gap through the implementation of a Certification platform for payload data and remote tracking generated by drones that can be used by UAS Operators, their Clients and Authorities as Auditing System.
The Positioning and time information of drones is ensured at the very origin, through the Galileo OSNMA service which represents the “missing piece of the puzzle” for this application. On the other side, the Blockchain technology guarantees that each information stored in the platform cannot be altered or being modified in the future.
Finally, our CERTIFLIGHT platform lays the foundation for a new class of business services for UAS Operators but also to address the challenges of the new paradigm of autonomous drones’ operations where the boundaries among drones Constructors, Operators and Pilots (if any) might be source of future legal disputes.
Alberto Mennella
Certiflight Project Coordinator
Project information
The project is coordinated by TopView s.r.l., a technology oriented SME and includes in its consortium companies and organisations with a proven track record in the U-space sector such as D-Flight, UpVision, Unifly, Distretto Tecnologico Aerospaziale, TA, The Sara Project, TuDelf, Way4WARD, Aria United, EuroUSC España and EuroUSC Italia.
Certiflight was presented to the call HORIZON-EUSPA-2021-SPACE-02-53: EGNSS applications for the Digital Age and became one of the projects selected by the European Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA). The project starts in November 2022 and will have a duration of two and a half years (30 months) after signing the Grant Agreement no 101082484.
