From November 2 to 13, ICAO Navigation Systems Panel held its sixth plenary session (NSP/6) virtually. During the meeting, the BeiDou task force of ICAO standardization jointly established by CAAC Office of Air Traffic Regulation and China Navigation Satellite Office facilitated the BeiDou-3 global navigation satellite system (BDS-3 system) to successfully pass the technical verifications by experts in all functional indicators, marking that the most fundamental and significant task for BDS to be incorporated in ICAO standards has been accomplished.

BDS-3’s successful completion of all technical verification marks two “firsts” - the first time that the signals of BDS-3 for civil use systematically passed the in-depth technical verifications of an international organization. As ICAO is the industry organization with the authoritative functional requirements for global navigation satellite systems, passing its verifications fully demonstrates that BDS-3 is already qualified to provide navigation service for global civil aviation, and this is the first time that China civil aviation managed to rely on a domestic team to successfully facilitate a complex mega-system independently innovated by China to be incorporated in ICAO standards, which has laid a solid foundation to comprehensively implement the go-global strategy for Chinese civil aviation standards, to promote the building of a country with a strong civil aviation industry in the new era and the development of BDS industrial standards, and to fully advance the aeronautical application of BDS during the 14th Five-year Plan period.

The BeiDou task force of ICAO standardization is under the joint leadership of CAAC Office of Air Traffic Regulation and China Navigation Satellite Office, established mainly by the National Key Laboratory of ATM New Navigation System Technology of Beihang University in cooperation with Tianjin 712 Communication & Broadcasting Co., Ltd., and it has spent 10 years in promoting the verification of BDS against ICAO standards. BDS represents one of the four GNSS constellations with the other three being the U.S. GPS, Russian GLONASS and European Galileo. For BDS to pass verifications, according to the work plan of ICAO Navigation Systems Panel, it needs to provide adequate documentation, to complete verifications against all technical indicators and to receive the recognition of all other three core constellations. The BDS verification in total identified 189 items, for which the BeiDou task force of ICAO standardization attended 50 technical discussions of the ICAO Navigation Systems Panel meetings, verification working team webinars and technical symposiums, submitted over 90 papers totaling thousands of pages, and answered more than 2000 questions.

For the next step, the ICAO Navigation Systems Panel will report the results of this meeting to ICAO Air Navigation Commission for review, and then ICAO Council, after which ICAO will inform member states of the draft standard for comments and then publish worldwide the standards by incorporating them into existing ICAO standards.