Planet-2: Providing in-flight weather services and observations to and from business and regional aircraft

The operators of the business and regional aviation in Europe would strongly benefit from inflight weather forecasting and trajectory tracking in order to fly safely and to optimise the trajectory. On the other hand, weather agencies would greatly benefit from weather observations provided by regional and business aviation (e.g. temperature and wind speed data collected by the aircraft sensors, nowadays delivered only by commercial airlines in the framework of AMDAR) as they would drastically increase geographical coverage and number of measurement thanks to different routes w.r.t. commercial airlines. Near-real-time in-flight weather services for business and regional aviation are nowadays quite well developed in USA, but still very limited in Europe due to the lack of equivalent infrastructure and service offer. Thus, the PLANET-2 project, co-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and led by ATMOSPHERE-F (F) with ATMOSPHERE-D (G), DLR (G), TRIAGNOSYS (G) and METEO-FRANCE (F), aims at developing a commercially sustainable in-flight weather service based on integrated space assets (i.e. SatCom and Navigation, with the support of Earth Observation data for some of the weather products) and terrestrial wireless networks (e.g. GPRS, 3G, 4G) to reduce service costs. The paper presents the main results of the work carried out to meet the PLANET-2 requirements.