EASA - iConspicuity

Mid-air collision avoidance traditionally relies on See and Avoid, a practice by which pilots actively look for other traffic in flight. Although effective, visual search and avoidance isn’t fully reliable, notably due to:
• Perceptual factors, such as being blinded by the sun or flying in deteriorated visibility environments, poor contrast, and difficulty to assess the speed of an incoming aircraft in a frontal trajectory.
• Cognitive factors like preoccupation, distraction, workload or fatigue, and
• Attention management: allocating attention to various key aspects of the flight.
The goal is to ensure that every aircraft can “Be Seen” by as many other aircraft as possible and then with this information to complement See and Avoid, pilots can “Be Aware” of their position and what is around them to prevent mid-air collisions.
eConspicuity is the act of transmission of position, which is done using equipment compatible with SERA 6005(c) and includes ADS-B using 1090 MHz, Universal Access Transceivers using 978 MHz, ADS-L using SRD860 frequency band and ADS-L using Mobile telephony. There are other systems that are using proprietary protocols supporting other functionalities than eConspicuity and these may not compatible with SERA 6005(c) such as FLARM (mostly used in gliders and providing close proximity collision warnings) or Pilot Aware (e.g. to transmit weather to cockpit). The key challenge is the lack of interoperability between the different systems, especially for larger commercial aircraft and helicopters who are likely to be ADS-B equipped.
The extension of eConspicuity is then ¡Conspicuity which is where information is received or broadcast back to the pilot to enhance situational awareness, which includes eConspicuity information from a range of different sources (solving many of the incompatibility issues) and even weather or other aviation data in a real time.