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Guiding Air Traffic Sans Radar With GPS
CamMac writes: "UPS Aviation Technologies, a subsidiary of UPS, helped in developing a new air traffic control system called ADS-B in which the aircraft broadcast their position, altitude, and airspeed to each other and the ground based on GPS data. This is all done without radar, so it is effective in remote areas or in mountainous terrain. It also displays all this information to pilots as well as ground control, so that aircraft are no longer dependant upon crypic orders from the gound to understand where everyone else in the sky is." Besides being a smart way to take advantage of all those GPS satellites, this also lends plotline cues for remakes of such classic cinema as Goldeneye, Diehard II and Airplane.
Indeed. I hat things that are har to undersand.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
The fuzzy factor imposed by the US government to thwart military uses of their GPS system was lifted on May 1 of this year (see http://abcnews.go.com /sections/tech/dailynews/gps_000501.html) - making the use of GPS 10 times more accurate. So, GPS, even for folks like us, is now accurate to within 20 yards. Plus, airplance don't have too many things in their way to block signals from those satellites.