International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B8, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
  
Flight strips at 3" October at main traffic routes in 
Bonn/Germany. Some parts of the surface were 
covered by haze. 
4. CONCEPT OF OPERATIONALIZATION 
In this chapter, a concept for an operational airborne rapid 
mapping service is described. The concept will list the costs for 
equipment investment and operational costs. 
4.1 Investment costs 
First, the investments in equipment for airborne remote sensing 
depend on the expected time delay between image acquisition 
and map delivery. For this, there are different stages of 
extension for the operational use of this service, starting from 
traditional airborne acquisitions without onboard processing 
and online delivery up to the final extension including the real 
time processing chain. 
The different scenarios of airborne and ground based equipment 
including the hardware costs and the expected reaction times 
are listed in table 3. 
  
  
  
  
Scenario Costs” | Time? Remark 
A No data link, post- 90k€ 71d 
processing 
B No data link, 120k€ «4h Data are sent 
onboard processing directly after 
landing 
C Data link, onboard 185k€ «6h Similar to B, 
processing, mobile but mob. GS 
ground station (GS) must be 
transferred 
  
D Data link, onboard 815k€ «2h 
processing, net of 
stationary antennas 
) Only hardware, without airplane, software, licenses, 
certifications, flight clearances, other infrastructure, etc. 
? Envisaged time span between notification and data delivery 
Table 3. Comparison of costs and time span for different 
scenarios 
  
  
  
  
  
  
Scenario A is the cheapest and is basically the traditional 
airborne ^ acquisition using standard software for 
orthorectification on the ground station after landing. The 
processing starts after arrival of the airplane at the ground 
station. At scenarios B to D, the orthorectification process will 
be performed onboard using GPS/IMU data, which will 
36 
drastically reduce the processing time. At the scenarios C and 
D, the data will be sent directly to ground station. The 
difference is that in scenario C the mobile ground station must 
be transferred to the destination area either in the airplane or by 
car whereas in scenario D the processed data are directly sent 
from the airplane to a net of stationary ground antennas. In the 
latter case, a net of nine receiving and processing stations well 
distributed over Germany makes direct downlink of data from 
the airplane possible without additional transfer times of the 
mobile ground stations (Fig. 5). In this case, a maximum data 
link range of 100km line-of-sight is assumed. 
  
  
Figure 5. Scenario for a German wide airborne rapid mapping 
service based on nine stationary receiving stations 
and one airplane (Scenario D). 
4.2 Operational costs 
The costs for the airplane, the airplane operation, the crews, the 
processing costs, map production costs, etc. related to the 
airborne platform are assumed to be mainly independent of the 
scenarios listed in Table 3. In the following, the costs based on 
an example are listed in Table 4 to make the costs comparable 
with satellite based acquisition. The calculations are based on 
the prices (by end of 2011) at the German Aerospace Center, 
which are given to external users. In the costs included are the 
amortisation of the airplane, airplane maintenance and other 
operational costs assuming 200 days of operation per year. 
Further, we assume Oberpfaffenhofen close to Munich as home 
station of the airplane, a 30kmx30km area in Hamburg as target 
area, and three days of image acquisitions. Further, costs for 
airborne and ground station crews will be listed which results in 
altogether 24k€ for the given example. 
        
  
Inter 
  
  
  
Table 4. 
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