The current voice communication system in use worldwide for Air Traffic Control (ATC) was standardised more than sixty years ago. Digital watermark technology for intellectual property right protection is part of many digital medias like music, pictures and videos. The EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) proposed employing this mass-market technique to embed a digital signature as watermark in ATC voice communication. The project is called Aircraft Identification Tag (AIT). Watermarked speech allows the automatic identification of the originator of the received voice message in real-time. This AIT concept helps to increase the safety in ATC and secures the legacy voice communication system against malicious attacks. Embedding the destination address of the called aircraft into the controller’s speech would extend AIT’s safety benefit towards the aircraft by an automatically generated attention getter in the cockpit when the aircraft is called. For this, active controller cooperation is required. This paper proposes the replacement of the currently used ‘Push To Talk’ (PTT) switch by the concept of a selective PTT switch, with which the controller indicates the addressed aircraft. An early demonstrator of the selective PTT switch concept was presented to former controllers for a preliminary scenario-based evaluation of the usability. The results are positive.
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Published on 01/01/2007
Volume 2007, 2007
DOI: 10.2514/6.2007-7772
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA license
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