Working Groups

Aerial Connectivity Joint Activity

ACJA, which stands for Aerial Connectivity Joint Activity, is a collaboration initiative between GUTMA and the GSMA.   ACJA focuses on promoting interchange and understanding between the aviation and cellular communities, the purpose being to enhance information sharing and avoid incompatibilities between those groups.

There is great interest from both the aviation and cellular communities in aerial cellular.  However, till now the two communities have mostly investigated the topic independently, leading to a misalignment of understanding, expectations, priorities, and standards.

ACJA was formed to make tangible progress towards addressing this misalignment through several initiatives:

  • The creation of a platform for the relevant stakeholders from aviation and mobile industries to share their respective views;
  • Educating stakeholders on all the relevant standards, making sure the contributors to Standard Development Organizations (SDO) in each field are aligned with term of understanding capabilities, and needs of the other communities;
  • Identifying potential synergies between the different SDO’s that could benefit the use of cellular networks in UTM, UAS and manned aviation.

What AJCA endeavours to do:

  • Facilitate communication between the two communities;
  • Implement a stronger alignment of the SDOs (Standard Development Organization) from the two communities;
  • Seek mutually acceptable architectures, interfaces, and methods and promote interoperability.

For further details please visit official ACJA website

Data Exchange

The Data Exchange working group can be understood as the association’s implementation body. It was launched in March 2017. The working group aims to make sure that all stakeholders defined in the UTM architecture document have the appropriate protocols to communicate electronically among one another when required. (Note that by definition, data exchange is limited to content and format; it doesn’t cover the infrastructure and data-link layers.)

The first output of the working group was a Flight Declaration Protocol, which facilitates the secure exchange of flight situation data between UTM providers. It was developed by the Altitude Angel team, which offered it to the Global UTM Association’s data exchange initiative in February 2017. The second protocol is the Flight Logging Protocol, headed by Yves Jusot.

The group’s governance is different from that of usual working groups. The technical steering committee is in charge of assessing proposals before they get to the working group and making sure the different protocols constitute a coherent whole. The project management committee is also composed of working group members, who are responsible for updating and growing a specific protocol according to the UTM community’s needs.

To encourage their broad adoption, protocols are indeed open, meaning organizations that are not members of the association can submit change requests and comments directly on a publicly accessible collaboration platform.

The technical steering committee is composed Andreas Lamprecht (Airmap) and Koen Williame (Unifly).

Contribute directly to our open source projects on Github.

  • Flight Declaration Protocol
  • Flight Logging Protocol
  • Air Traffic Data Protocol

UTM Architecture

The mission of the Architecture working group is to define a high-level architecture that is globally accepted by the industry and promoted to national aviation authorities as the basis of a standard UTM architecture. Its chair is Andres Van Swalm (Unifly) and its vice chair is Kai Lothar John (GLVI).

The group published its first document UAS Traffic Management Architecture on April 29, 2017. It describes a high-level UTM architecture for Very-Low Level (VLL) operations, considering all types of UAS operations (VLOS, EVLOS, and BVLOS) and the needs of both RPAS and autonomous unmanned aircraft. It also establishes a common terminology and a set of UTM stakeholders, with their needs and responsibilities.

This common framework should be a guideline to develop the association’s efforts to foster interoperable UTM, but also for the international or national bodies.

Download V1 at Global_UTM_Architecture_V1.pdf