Safety Considerations About Hypersonic Vehicles Integration into ATM/HA

In recent years, the development of new concepts of suborbital space vehicles for passenger and/or things transportation transiting through ATM and operating at High Altitudes has led to increasingly significant progress of technologies to ensure efficient and safe integration of hypersonic flights into controlled and non-controlled airspace. Airspace segregation ensures safety but is not sustainable for long-term operations.
Investigations are needed on regulating hypersonic vehicles for integration into managed and regulated airspace and at higher altitudes. Moreover, ATM must develop strategies for controlling hypersonic sub-orbital flights and enhancing systems to ensure ATCOs can handle them effectively.
The technological keystone of the European Commission's Single European Sky Initiative that aims to integrate new entrances in an innovative ATM is Single European Sky Air Traffic management (ATM) Research (SESAR) project. From ATM perspective, the trajectory-based operations requirements, developed in SESAR, can facilitate a robust ATM integration of such types of operations. In this direction, these new entrants can be considered as the conventional traffic in ATM scenarios. However, it remains to be analysed how the potential increase in traffic due to the integration of hypersonic operations and their different speed performances, characteristics and constraints can impact the current mandatory level of Safety.
This paper aims to provide an overview of potential ATM scenarios including suborbital vehicles, investigating on the potential effects that these new operations can have in terms of Safety on risk models currently applied by the SESAR safety methodology. Based on the identified safety impacts of hypersonic operations on the future ATM developments, a gaps analysis has been carried out to identify potential additional requirements for contributing to the quantification of the new safety criteria related to the hazard analysis of the Integrated Risk Picture (IRP) for ATM in causing or preventing accidents.

Keywords: Safety, ATM, Hypersonic vehicles.