Cargo airlines and other aircraft operating agencies are interested in commercially exploiting and benefiting from the technical possibilities provided by unmanned aircraft systems. Use cases could be long-range unmanned air transport, flight calibration, or surveillance missions. It is natural that, depending on weight and size, unmanned aircraft are going to use the existing ground infrastructure together with manned aircraft. However, it is also a well-known fact that remotely piloted or automatic / autonomous unmanned aircraft do not have the same abilities and behavior as manned aircraft. There is a need to achieve a safe, orderly and expeditious flow of a mixed traffic constellation even when more than one unmanned aircraft are involved in aerodrome operations at the same time. Unfortunately, due to a lack of international standardization and regulation, it is still unknown which abilities a commercial unmanned aircraft will have. This makes it very difficult to define operational procedures. In the frame of the SESAR 2020 project `Surface Management Operations' (SuMO), a procedural concept for ground movements of unmanned aircraft together with manned aircraft was elaborated. This concept uses so called segmented standard taxi routes and aims at realizing mixed traffic with an equal level of safety compared to pure manned traffic as well as very low system requirements for unmanned aircraft systems. In November 2017, this concept was validated together with tower controllers, conventional pilots, remotely piloted aircraft operators and an air traffic management expert from the German Air Navigation Service Provider DFS in a gaming workshop over several days. The validation covered departures, arrivals and non-nominal situations like C2 link loss or lost communication. Results showed that this concept likely allows a fast and easy integration of unmanned aircraft systems. It was rated as very practical, realistic and acceptable in terms of safety, human performance and the key performance areas access and equity as well as interoperability.

The safe and orderly integration of unmanned aircraft in the airspace is surely among the most difficult challenges to be solved in the near future. However, a safe and fluid traffic management on the ground is not less important and not less challenging, as completely different aspects have to be considered here. Much less work has been done yet to solve this question. In the frame of the project Surface Management Operations (SuMO), a procedural solution has been developed to enable fully integrated unmanned airport ground movements while allowing air traffic controllers to guarantee a safe, orderly and expeditious flow of traffic. This concept is based on the idea of segmented standard taxi routes for unmanned aircraft, while maintaining current procedures for manned aircraft. From 2017 to 2019, a two-stage validation campaign validated this new solution. No concerns regarding safety or human factors issues were revealed. Access and Equity, as well as Interoperability, were found to be very satisfying. A fast time simulation of mixed manned and unmanned traffic, using the proposed solution, was almost as efficient as pure manned traffic and can easily be implemented at medium-size airports. This article provides information about the experimental setup and the conduction of both validations stages, and illustrates obtained results. It closes with a discussion and an outlook.

The insights presented in this article are outcomes of a security research project that was initiated to collate and interpret the latest findings gathered in the domain of air traffic management security. The concept of a holistic approach to security management has been evaluated. Due to the large scope of the project, only an excerpt of the findings is provided in this article. This article focuses on a brief description of a security prototype validation methodology, developed within the project. To provide tangible application of the methodology, the adoption to a security prototype is developed, which is intended to enhance security of the air traffic control voice communication system.