The IMAA project aims to take advantage of GTD’s 12 years of experience in R&D aeronautics projects and the feasibility study carried out in conjunction with an important European airline company to carry out a demonstration of a meteorological service for airlines. The main objective of this project is to create a service that can be purchased and used by commercial airlines worldwide. This service would consist in receiving real-time meteorological data that could affect the flight plan, during the flight. The data would be visualised in real time on a tablet embarked in the cockpit, showing possible meteorological conflicts that could occur throughout the flight plan. This way, the pilots could avoid meteorological conflicts increasing flight safety. The main challenge is sending meteorological forecasts through the ACARS radio communication channel, used in most airplanes worldwide. With improved meteorological forecasts, the pilots will be able to anticipate meteorological threats such as storms and turbulence one hour before finding themselves in front of these types of meteorological phenomena. The pilots will go from tactical navigation with the embarked radar to strategic navigation, with enough time to agree on the best flight plan together with the control towers, minimising detours and fuel consumption. In a long-distance flight, it’s not rare that the pilot ends up making a detour of more than 400km to avoid a severe storm. By anticipating turbulence, the crew can inform the passengers that they need to use their seat belt and therefore avoid injuries that, at the end of the year, represent a significant and expensive cost for the airline companies.The IMAA project has the following lines of work: Optimising meteorological data transmission through radio (ACARS) and carry out tests with the communication provider SITA. Completing the solution making it compatible with several meteorological data providers. Evolving robustness and safety of the software used in the touch-based devices in which the client version of IMAA will be executed (pilot’s tablet and embarked tablet). Developing a version for iPad. Going from a prototype version compatible with PC to a scalable cloud solution. Validating the solution with a flight testing campaign. The final results of IMAA are: New optimisation technologies for the transmission of meteorological data through radio communication. A robust and flight tested EFB solution which provides updated meteorological forecasts during the flights. This service implies having high availability servers in which the clients’ requests are received, in this case the pilots of the commercial flights. These servers would host the highly detailed meteorological data provided by the main suppliers of meteorological data in the world. A certain part of this data would need to be processed before being used in the IMAA system. The IMAA project was carried out in 2015 and 2016 with the support of the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
