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The European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme has funded the SENS4ICE (Sensors for Certifiable Hybrid Architectures for Safer Aviation in Icing Environment) project [1], an innovative approach for the development and testing of new sensors for the detection of supercooled large droplets (SLD). SLD may impinge behind the protected surfaces of aircraft and therefore represents a threat to aviation safety. The newly developed sensors will be tested in combination with an indirect detection method on two aircraft, in two parallel flight programs: One on the Embraer Phenom 300 in the U.S. and one on the ATR-42 in Europe. In this framework the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center) is in charge of the airborne measurements and data evaluation of the microphysical properties of clouds encountered during the SENS4ICE field campaigns in February, March and April 2023.

The PLANET System was used for real-time satellite data transmission during the HAIC-HIWC Darwin field campaign (January to March 2014). The basic system was initially providing aircraft tracking, chat, weather text messages (METAR, TAF, etc.), and aeronautical information (NOTAMs) in a standalone application. In the framework of the HAIC project, many improvements were made in order to fulfill requirements of the onboard and ground science teams for the field campaign. The aim of this paper is to present the main improvements of the system that were implemented for the Darwin field campaign. New features of the system are related to the hardware component, the communication protocol, weather and tracking display, geomarkers on the map, and image processing and compression before onboard transfer.