CERTIUM Blog

The future of air traffic management: LDACS

LDACS is about to enter the operational deployment phase. Learn more about the technological advantages, such as global interoperability, ground infrastructure sovereignty and high resilience.

The aviation sector is facing significant challenges, including coping with predicted increases in global air traffic and achieving ambitious sustainability targets in terms of emissions reductions. To succeed, organizations require a diversified strategy where one of the central goals is improvement of overall operational efficiency.

The role of digital transformation in air traffic management

The digital transformation of air traffic management (ATM) is a critical enabler of sustainable growth in aviation. Air-ground connectivity represents a significant bottleneck that can be resolved using high-rate datalinks, as proposed in the European ATM Master Plan. The plan advocates for a multilink approach, where different types of technologies are used to address different modes of operation and to overcome datalink coverage and capacity limitations in specific areas.

Benefits

LDACS offers several important benefits for all airspace users, including:

• Open framework: LDACS fosters market competition and ensures global interoperability, allowing users to select different data service providers without the need to change the avionic bay and avoiding the costs of recertification of the aircraft.
• Distributed terrestrial, cellular architecture: LDACS provides robustness, scalability, and sovereignty, ensuring high resilience to failures or to intentional local interference, and enabling each country or region to have full control of its critical ground infrastructure for the control of its national airspace.
• High-performance capabilities: LDACS supports ATS/B2 services and future ATS/B3 services, providing data throughput up to 2.6 Mbps—up to 200 times higher than the throughput of the current system.
• Low latency: LDACS achieves latency below 100ms, making it suitable for safety-critical real-time applications for ATC operations.
• Data traffic prioritization: LDACS technology can manage different categories of data traffic and assign different Quality of Services, enabling effective traffic prioritization for ATC and AOC services.
• Integration of CNS: LDACS can provide additional features such as navigation and surveillance data to aircraft, thus offering the potential for a fully integrated CNS system.

Deployment scenarios

• Overcoming short-term VDLm2 limitations: LDACS can be integrated into the existing ground infrastructure, providing a way to add LDACS to forward-fit aircraft, prior to the availability of IPS avionics, and a solution for retrofitting LDACS to aircraft which do not support IPS (and still using OSI).
• Long-term solution for future communication infrastructure: LDACS provides seamless integration into the forthcoming communication infrastructure: the Aeronautical Telecommunication Network (ATN/IPS), establishing resilient connectivity between the airborne IPS system and the ground infrastructure to enable reliable end-to-end connectivity between safety-critical applications.

The need for LDACS and its role

ANSPs serving high-density airspace today rely heavily on CPDLC for operational efficiency. However, VDLm2 is expected to reach capacity crunch in 2028-2030 due to increasing traffic and new ATC/AOC data requirements. LDACS is foreseen as a wideband and cyber-secure data link service for primary or backup means of continental operation and as a successor of VDLm2

Conclusion

LDACS represents an essential pillar supporting the digital transition of aeronautical communications, and is ready to play a main role in the FCI multilink infrastructure in continental airspaces. Its deployment is critical to coping with predicted traffic growth and achieving carbon-neutrality targets.

The road ahead

The standardization of LDACS is expected to be finalized in 2027. ANSPs strongly encourage the finalization of standardization, in order to give LDACS a global relevance. Together with the achievement of final maturity steps, this will extend the acceptance of the technology and the awareness of its benefits also from stakeholders outside of Europe.

The implementation of LDACS will require a coordinated effort from industry, ANSPs, and regulatory bodies. However, the benefits of LDACS make it a critical component of the future of air traffic management, and its deployment is essential to achieving sustainable growth and carbon-neutrality.