Most of you are aware that ICAO has a working group looking at improvements to the Aerodrome Surfaces criteria with the Annex 14 document. From November 2030, there will be a new criteria for this and it currently known at the ICAO Obstacle Limitation Surfaces (OLS) Framework.

This framework divides the new aerodrome surfaces into two distinct sets; these being Obstacle Free Surfaces (OFS) and Obstacle Evaluation Surfaces (OES). To assist with the construction of these surfaces there is a new categorisation called Aeroplane Design Group (ADG).

Today, we have attended a webinar from the UK CAA giving an overview of the new OLS requirements. This means that the development team will be implementing these new Obstacle Limitation Surfaces into the FPAssistant SDK. Some work has already begun with the handling of runways and the drawing of the runway strip. The SDK will have the OFS areas developed first with obstacle analysis and then onto the OES.

With respect to the UK, the CAA have announced that regulatory alignment will start soon and this will cover UK specific criteria defined in CAP 168, CAP 232 and a few others.

This work is expected to take time and will be done at a pace to get the design correct. To assist with the testing and show this feature, it is planned that an sample app will be available on GitHub that will show this OLS feature within the FPAssistant SDK. This will be open source.

If you want to join us on this development journey, the dev team would welcome anyone who is interested in participating at any stage including Alpha or Beta. Please get in contact.