Small Air Transport (SAT) deals with small general aviation and commuter/feeder aircraft and their technology needs: ‘fixed wing’ aircraft with between 4 and 19 seats. To meet the Flightpath 2050 target whereby "90% of travelers within Europe are able to complete their journey, door-to-door within 4 hours", SAT aircraft ails at filling a gap that many other travel paradigms struggle to fill.

Currently, there is a big need for connecting small airports in remote areas. However, today no affordable solution is available due to the high cost per seat of current available small aircraft. Thus, a reduction of operating cost of small aircraft (up to 19 seats) is needed to open this promising market, contributing to improve mobility in Europe, connecting small cities and helping to reduce flight time, matching the FlightPath 2050 "d2d 4h" (4 hours door to door) challenge. In parallel, aviation sustainability issues have become more and more important, being aviation pollution an important source of global environmental pollution. The SAT Initiative proposed in Clean Sky 2 represents the R&D (Research & Development) interests of European manufacturers of small aircraft used for passenger and cargo transport, belonging to EASA´s CS-23 (European Aviation Safety Agency Certification Specifications-23) regulatory base. This includes dozens of industrial companies (many of which SMEs – Small Medium Enterprises –), research centres and universities. The community covers the full supply chain, i.e. aircraft integrators, engine and systems manufacturers and research organizations. SAT main goal is to meet the Flightpath 2050 target whereby "90% of travellers within Europe are able to complete their journey, door-to-door, within 4 hours", improving overall European air mobility, by means of an eco-friendly, and economically viable aircraft answering sustainability needs, market demand, and cost-effectiveness. In particular, two platforms are being investigated: a Green 19-seats EIS2025 (Entry Into Service in 2025) and an E-STOL (Electric/hybrid Short Take-Off and Landing) EIS2032 (Entry Into Service in 2032) 19-seats commuter. This proposal presents the work plan 2020-23 toward the SAT-TA final objectives.

AVATAR is dedicated to developing a digital twin platform to enable continuous monitoring of the vehicle during its service life for the purpose predictive maintenance. AVATAR’s digital twin model acts in parallel to the real structure and provides, where necessary, an early warning of operational behaviour that deviates from expected (simulated). Additionally, by recording the actual load spectrum that each air vehicle experiences during every flight, it will optimize the individual service life, which contributes towards a sustainable air mobility. AVATAR’s will contribute to an increase safety of urban skies and has the potential to optimise the design and performance of air vehicles by providing real load data for each vehicle. The IoT sensing skin proposed by AVATAR is a key enabler for real-time critical operational information acquisition and connectivity between the physical aircraft and the digital counterpart through wireless communication. AVATAR DT platform will provide a seamless integration of IoT, big data and machine learning to collect, compute and predict. AVATAR will conform to the modern approach towards developing a digital twin based on different types of data and advanced analytical methods which eliminates the need for the real air vehicle and the virtual models to be directly connected and builds this connection through ML and AI. AVATAR contributes to the acceleration of digital transformation of air mobility, particularly in urban setting.

The key objective of the project EMPHASIS (EMPowering Heterogenuous Aviation through cellular SIgnalS) is to increase safety, reliability and interoperability of General Aviation/Rotorcrafts (GA/R) operations both with commercial aviation and with emerging drones operations. These aspects are foreseen as critical elements to secure and improve airspace access for GA/R users in future airspace environment and improve operational safety of their operations. This objective is planned to be achieved through affordable CNS capabilities tailored for GA/R users where the envisioned path to reduce avionics costs is driven by: 1. Deep analysis of Communication, Navigation and Surveillance system requirements (including reliability and integrity) based on the specificities of GA/R operations. The analysis should allow to identify requirements critical for operational safety and potentially lower requirements with limited applicability to GA/R operations. 2. Optimal combining of ground and airborne technologies enabled through advanced communication means. 3. Innovative approach to certification allowing to achieve overall safety objectives with reduced impact on the cost. The most promising technologies (combining both on-board and ground elements) will be developed up to the proof-of-concept maturity level.