WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - High-altitude flight is getting increasing attention from sectors ranging from telecommunications to emergency response. To make that airspace more accessible, NASA is developing an air traffic management system covering those altitudes and supplementing its work with real-time data from a research balloon in Earth's stratosphere.
Aircraft at high altitudes - 50,000 feet or higher, or roughly 10,000 to 20,000 feet above most commercial traffic - offer new possibilities for delivering internet connectivity in regions in need of reliable service. And they can deliver unprecedented situational awareness for the ground below, providing early warnings for floods and other disasters.
For these types of operations, 'station-keeping,' or remaining in the same region for extended periods of time, can be ideal for aircraft including balloons and airships.
These flights will require a different sort of air traffic management system from the ones that cover most commercial flights - and it needs to be dependable. NASA announced that it is working to produce a system that ensures aircraft can operate safely in high-altitude airspace, with a particular focus on station-keeping.
'Current high-altitude air traffic management is manual and piecemeal,' said Jeff Homola, researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 'We saw the need for a scalable solution - something multiple operators in a shared airspace can safely rely on. Our system provides shared awareness of the airspace, identifies potential conflicts, enables cooperative conflict resolution, and allows operators to complete missions safely.'
NASA sid its researchers are collaborating with Aerostar and Sceye, developers and operators of high-altitude aircraft, to evaluate the system.
This NASA system enables operators to share live flight data, information about their flight plans, and potential conflict alerts. Based on this information, operators can coordinate flight plans in real time. During a 2025 simulation at NASA Ames, researchers tested how efficiently that data sharing would be among operators of lighter-than-air vehicles - both balloons and airships.
For this test, NASA, Aerostar and Sceye acted as operators of high-altitude vehicles, sharing information from facilities in California, South Dakota, and New Mexico. The U.S. space agency said they were able to share flight information, as well as telemetry data from an Aerostar stratospheric balloon floating 66,500 feet above Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at the time of the testing.
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