Aeronautical Mobile Communication:The Evolution from Narrowband to Broadband

1.Introduction Air transportation is the driving force for national or regional economic development and industrial upgrading,and the aeronautical communication system(ACS)is a core infrastructure of the air transportation system(ATS),ensuring safety and a high level of efficiency.With the fast development of global ATSs,various aviation fields including air traffic control(ATC),airline operation control(AOC),and airline passenger communication(APC)have introduced higher requirements for aeronautical communication capability.

Editorial of the Special Issue on Novel Methodologies in Air Transportation

Although the air industry has been affected by the recent coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic,it has shown rapid growth in economic development and evolving international trading worldwide.Such a trend is anticipated to resume post the pandemic,probably at a slightly slower pace.The growth of the air industry accelerated the movement of goods and people but also created challenges to air transportation systems,including operational inefficiency of airspace system,flight and passenger delays,divergent demands in aircraft manufacturing,and urgent needs for disruptive technologies to enhance the existing air transportation system.Such challenges attracted the interests of researchers worldwide.This special issue assembles novel methodologies in air transportation,the cutting-edge findings,and outcomes of researchers’efforts responding to these challenges.It fills the gaps in existing literature and offers solutions and directions on sustainable development of air transportation.

Multi-faceted spatio-temporal network for weather-aware air traffic flow prediction in multi-airport system

As one of the core modules for air traffic flow management,Air Traffic Flow Prediction(ATFP)in the Multi-Airport System(MAS)is a prerequisite for demand and capacity balance in the complex meteorological environment.Due to the challenge of implicit interaction mechanism among traffic flow,airspace capacity and weather impact,the Weather-aware ATFP(Wa-ATFP)is still a nontrivial issue.In this paper,a novel Multi-faceted Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network(MSTGCN)is proposed to address the Wa-ATFP within the complex operations of MAS.Firstly,a spatio-temporal graph is constructed with three different nodes,including airport,route,and fix to describe the topology structure of MAS.Secondly,a weather-aware multi-faceted fusion module is proposed to integrate the feature of air traffic flow and the auxiliary features of capacity and weather,which can effectively address the complex impact of severe weather,e.g.,thunderstorms.Thirdly,to capture the latent connections of nodes,an adaptive graph connection constructor is designed.The experimental results with the real-world operational dataset in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area,China,validate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art machine-learning and deep-learning based baseline approaches in performance.