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INNOVATION

We spend more than 10% of our turnover to Research and Development and participate in national and European projects.
CGX AERO is involved in the European Clean Sky 2 program via its participation in the FIVER project (validation of the Flight Management System with massive testing) and in the SafeNcy project (automatic generation of emergency trajectories for large passenger aircraft).
As a member of Aerospace Valley and of SAFE competitiveness cluster, CGX AERO has participated in projects such as GAIA Shared Virtual Sky® project, SimCA (airport driving simulator) and Path4Flight® (automatic path generator for helicopters).

As part of the European Clean Sky 2 program, in the frame of the FIVER (FMS Innovative Validation for Enhanced Robustness) project, CGX AERO and SCALIAN cooperate with Thales to reinforce the technological advance of its Flight Management System, through "Massive Testing" methods by integrating Simulation and Artificial Intelligence.

The three French actors develop anomaly detection methods on complex objects such as instrument flight trajectories. CGX AERO brings its expertise in the creation and protection of instrument flight trajectories, while SCALIAN brings its technical know-how and expertise in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to create and deploy the tools, methods, and models adapted to Thales's needs.

These principles will help to increase the maturity of the FMS and, through this, determine optimized trajectories with the aim of reducing kerosene consumption and thus the environmental impact. FIVER is the first project aiming to bring together the reference flight paths published by Civil Aviation, their operational constraints, with data integrated into avionics.

This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement n°820516

The objective of the SafeNcy project is to contribute to the design of a new on-board function for future Flight Management Systems. The main focus is to support the crew members and enhance the efficiency in the management of emergency situations. The considered emergency situations are related to loss of certain aircraft capabilities such as climbing, turning or accelerating.

The considered new-function focuses on supporting the crew members in identifying the safest and easiest potential landing site and to provide feasible trajectory to reach it.

Several constraints and environment components need to be addressed within the development phase. Main focus is done on:

modelling of remaining aircraft capabilities to be inline of what the crew-member can provide in term of information;
considering suitability of landing site: ground occupation, available landing distance, orientation, runway characteristics and contamination;
considering reachability and flyability from the aircraft position and situation to the selected landing site to be addressed with the terrain and obstacles data as well as the weather conditions;
safety analysis and impact assessment of an “unsafe” flying aircraft due to its reduced capabilities from various point of views: environment when considering urban and dangerous areas overfly, meteorological and ATC.

This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement n°864771

GEVAUDAN

GEVAUDAN is one of the two sub-projects of the SEFA project (“Systèmes Embarqués et Fonctions Avancées”) from the CORAC. A call for partnership has been launched in 2014 by Thales Avionics, Airbus, Airbus Helicopters and Dassault Aviation in order to build a consortium and submit a proposal for the sub-projects. CGX AERO has been chosen as a partner for two work packages of GEVAUDAN.

GEVAUDAN is dedicated to the Flight Management System (FMS). The overall objective of the project is to design a new generation of FMS (FMS-NG) having a more distributed and evolutive architecture, and benefiting from new functionalities.

CGX AERO is involved in the following work packages:

WP 6.9: 3D FMS coding of IFR visual flight procedures and VFR routes
WP 6.11: Analysis of routes and IFR flight procedures specific to helicopters

The objective of the WP 6.9 is to propose a strategy in order to encode the visual segments of flight procedures into the FMS, and thus provide pilots with at least visual helps (and at best guidance) to fly these visual segments.

The objective of the WP 6.11 is to analyze the routes and IFR flight procedures specific to helicopters and:

Develop and prototype helicopter flight procedures in order to tests new cockpit functionalities
Find out the lacks of current standards and regulations regarding helicopters
Study specific situations for future helicopter cockpit functionalities

WP 6.9 has led to the delivery of methodologies and prototypes of visual procedure coding that have been loaded in Thales Flight Management System. WP 6.11 has led to the delivery of a series of flight procedures specific to helicopters, in different conditions chosen precisely to explore the corners of the regulations and to test helicopter avionics in extreme conditions. These procedures have been loaded in Thales Flight Management System and flown in simulation.

PATH4FLIGHT® (P4F)

Artificial Intelligence, Collaborative Project Management

Path4Flight®project aims at developing a ground/on-board solution for automated generation of helicopters' flights and trajectories procedures using real-time meteorological, geographical and aeronautical data base.
Path4Flight®project is supported by the Castres-Mazamet Technopole, Aerospace Valley and SAFE clusters, Midi-Pyrénées Region and the department of Tarn.

FENICS

Foundation for study of new interactions for future cockpits

As part of the new interactions for future cockpits, CGX AERO is taking part of FENICS, an R&D project conducted by AIRBUS, DASSAULT, EUROCOPTER and THALES, started in 2013 for a period of 2 years.

Within this project, CGX AERO, AIRBUS DEFENCE & SPACE (formally ASTRIUM), the ENAC and the SIA have the task of exploring new solutions capable of providing reliable data to aircrafts and helicopter's new functionalities. The primary expectation is to have a broad and expert vision of current data management, from their creation to their publication concerning the quality and disponibility aspects as well as any question raised by those involved in aeronautical data production chain. The goal is then to find solutions to meet the needs of new features by detecting all possible means of improving the data chain used by applications / functions related to the cockpit of the future.

The main objectives of this project are:

Analysis of needs for specific data for the new features of the future cockpit.
Exploration of the data production solution that is specific to the new features of the future cockpit.

HEDGE-NEXT

Helicopters Deploy GNSS in Europe – NEXT

HEDGE NEXT is framed as follow up of activities initiated under previous HEDGE activity. This new project phase aims at completing the operational implementation of EGNOS operations into the rotorcraft domain, by supporting the certification of vehicles and validation of EGNOS enhanced operations from different operators spread over Europe.

HEDGE NEXT in addition includes an important part on R&D, towards the full exploitation of EGNOS services into the rotorcraft sector. Those initiatives are either identified and recommended to pursue during the first phase of the activity, or upcoming from parallel activities participated by the Consortia leader under Clean Sky framework, and as such endorsed by Eurocopter and Augusta Westland R&D strategy.

More precisely HEDGE NEXT will target the following objectives:

To operationally implement Rotorcraft EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) APV (Approach with Vertical Guidance) in selected sites in Spain, Poland and Switzerland.
To create low-level RNAV routes that intercept the SOAP (SBAS Offshore Approach Procedure) procedure in the North Sea.
To develop an “e-VFR” navigation module in order to enhance the navigation of helicopters in marginal VFR conditions.
To move forward on the development, test and validation of curved approaches for rotorcraft helicopters using GPS and SBAS as sensor: PinS RNP-AR concept.

GARDEN

CleanSky JU

The GARDEN project forms part of the CleanSky European initiative and aims at developing IFR procedures based on GNSS that enable helicopters to reach airports/heliports regardless ongoing air trafic.
IFR trajectory design for helicopters is based on low noise production's trajectories.
As a member of the project consortium including Egis Avia, la DGAC, Pildo Consulting, CGX has provided its expertise in procedure design.

SIMCA

SimCA is a simulator for airport driving that enables to improve the capacity of airports developers to optimize the safety, the traffic in self-restraint area and thus to decrease operating costs.

GAIA SHARED VIRTUAL SKY

Data Exchanges Models and Criticity

GAIA Shared Virtual Sky offers an interoperability platform between simulators and collaborative services design to adress the challenges and problems with the air transport system throughout the life cycle. Among the project partners: AIRBUS, ENAC, DGAC-DSNA, THALES.

The main objectives of the project are:

A plateform for ATM simulators interoperability
A web service allowing AIXM 4.5 data sharing
Environment data management
Critical data inventory
Data inconsistency management
Complementary services (data visualization, data checking)