For UAS to be granted full access to civil airspace, their safety case must address
collision avoidance, including the lack of an onboard pilot who could see-and-avoid other
traffic, as on conventional aircraft. This paper discusses several methods and tools that
have been accepted for modeling and evaluating the safety of collision avoidance for
manned aircraft. Example results are illustrated. Issues and additional work for extending
their use to UAS are discussed.
Today, many manned aircraft are equipped with the Traffic Alert and Collision
Avoidance System (TCAS II), the world standard system for collision avoidance.
However, simply installing that system aboard UAS is problematic for a number of
reasons affecting the safety calculation.
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