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1. Introduction
The small air transport (SAT) aviation domain is gaining increasing interest over the past decade, based on its perspective relevance in enabling efficient travel over a regional range, in particular for commuters, by exploiting available small airports and fixed wing aircraft with up to 19 seats (EASA CS-23 category) (EPATS Consortium, 2007a, 2007b; Scarpellini Metz and Bowen, 2004; Dollyhigh, 2002; Clean Aviation, 2020). To support the further development of SAT aviation, Clean Sky 2 JU (European Commission, 2011), in accordance with the European Commission vision for aviation toward 2050 (Piwek and Wiśniowski, 2016; Lucky et al., 2024), awarded for funding the project COAST (Cost Optimized Avionics SysTem), which started in 2016, evolved according to the project plans and has been successfully concluded in 2023 (Di Vito et al., 2017a, 2017b).
In the COAST project, relevant technologies enabling affordable cockpit and avionics and supporting single-pilot operations for SAT vehicles have been designed (Di Vito et al., 2017a, 2017b; Vaispacher et al., 2022; Kanovsky et al., 2022; Zaykov et al., 2020; Wing and Cotton, 2011) and validated through flight demonstrations. Such technologies include single-pilot operations enablers for flight management, namely, as relevant enabler for single pilot operations in future traffic management scenarios (Di Vito et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d), the tactical separation system (TSS) (Montesarchio et al., 2022); the advanced weather awareness system (AWAS) (Grzybowski and Szpakowska-Peas, 2020); and the flight reconfiguration system (FRS) (Di Vito et al., 2017a, 2017b). Among them, the dedicated decision-making support system designed to assist the pilot in the separation management, also in case of delegation of the separation responsibility to the pilot by the ATC, was the TSS (Di Vito et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d).
The TSS baseline version was developed according to incremental approach, starting from conceptual design and passing, then, to algorithms design and implementation as software prototype, which was validated through fast-time as well as real-time validation campaigns (Di Vito et al., 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d; Di Vito et al., 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). Once successfully completed the software prototype validation, the final TSS software, including not only main software to be executed in the COAST avionics but also the dedicated HMI to...