The Air Navigation is gradually supporting GNSS based landing procedures that can provide high precision positioning at lower costs than ground based infrastructures (such as ILS). The GNSS signal can be affected from various sources including Space Weather perturbations in Ionosphere.

The SWAIR opportunity fits on the interception of the emergent usage of GNSS on Air Navigation and Space Weather technological advances. While Air Navigation is becoming more dependent on space technology, with an increasing number of GNSS based landing procedures, the advances of Space Weather introduce new opportunities at regional level as well as specialized services for the sector.

The SWAIR opportunity is thus driven by technology penetration and evolution that will create a need for monitoring and prediction services on aviation sector.

The main target users are the air traffic controllers typically operating at an Air Navigation control centre or at the airdrome control tower. Another type of user is the aviation supervisor / regulator authority that needs to assess the performance of the navigation signals in order to ensure the availability and accuracy requirements are met, following ICAO’s (Annex10, vol. 1) established requirements for national authorities to monitor the GNSS signal quality in their territory. The airline industry benefits from GNSS based operations and thus could also become a user of SWAIR to improve their operations.