Russia to Integrate Drone Monitoring System Into Its Civil Aviation

A new system for monitoring unmanned aerial vehicles in airspace used by civil aviation flights has begun testing in Russia at the Putilovo airfield near St. Petersburg.

It will allow the regulation of flights by all types of aircraft, while ensuring full safety under International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards, the general director of Aviatelecominvest LLC Alexander Ignatyev said.

The project is being implemented by Aviatelecominvest LLC, a major developer and manufacturer of digital means of aircraft flight monitoring, Geoscan LLC and DIAM-AERO LLC, as well as the Aeroscript Research Center.

"At Putilovo we have installed an ADS-B 1090 ES automatic dependent surveillance ground station, which receives monitoring data from transponder-equipped aircraft and transmits flight data to the Nebosvod system using the standard Asterix cat21 protocol," Ignatiev said.

"The solutions we are developing are the technological basis for the safe use of UAV both in shared space with manned aircraft and in dedicated environments, such as very low altitude (VLL) and urban aeromobility space," he explained, adding that flights in conjunction with manned small aircraft will take place at the end of May.

Ignatiev noted that "the standard of automatic dependent surveillance ADS-B 1090ES is globally accepted for the monitoring of civil aviation aircraft".

This standard implies that the aircraft independently determines its position in the air by GPS or GLONASS and then sends this data to the ADS-B ground station, using the 1090ES data transmission standard recommended by the ICAO and used throughout civil aviation.

Alexey Khripunov, general director of SIC Aeroscript, the developer of the Nebosvod digital platform, explained that the airborne detection service has been successfully tested at the Putilovo airfield since 2023.

"We are integrating drones from Russian developers and UAS manufacturers into Nebosvod," Khripunov said. "We can say that already more than 80 percent of domestic manufacturers are integrated into the platform. In addition to the integration of UAVs, we are testing other technologies necessary to ensure safe UAV flights."

"'Nebosvod' works in such a way that it can receive surveillance data from all sources, process and predict conflicts in the air, not only between drones, but also between drones and manned aircraft. According to the scenario of the 1090ES Automatic Dependent Surveillance Test, the drones of the Geoscan and DIAM-AERO companies, as well as a manned small aircraft, will take to the air," he concluded.