BlueSky ATC Simulator Project: An Open Data and Open Source Approach

To advance ATM research as a science, ATM research results should be made more comparable. A possible way to do this is to share tools and data. This paper presents a project that investigates the feasibility of a fully open-source and open-data approach to air traffic simulation. Here, the first of the two main challenges is to achieve a high fidelity, without using proprietary data, e.g. for aircraft performance. The second challenge is to increase the adoption by the community by keeping the program easy to use, easy to modify, multi-platform, downloadable for free and running stand-alone on relatively simple systems. The approach chosen by the project is to investigate this feasibility by trying to start the development. The paper describes the many hurdles to be overcome when using a fully open-data and open-source policy in this area.