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Senate Votes To Replace Aviation Radar With GPS
plover writes "The US Senate on Monday passed by a 93-0 margin a bill that would implement the FAA's NextGen plan to replace aviation radar with GPS units. It will help pay for the upgrade by increasing aviation fuel taxes on private aircraft. It will require two inspections per year on foreign repair stations that work on US planes. And it will ban pilots from using personal electronics in the cockpit. This just needs to be reconciled with the House version and is expected to become law soon. This was discussed on Slashdot a few years ago."
Right now the Gen AV radar system is actually based upon transponders reporting their altitude, position, speed and bearing. The only people that use active radar these days are the kinds of guys that work at NORAD or on an AWACS.
...and then ...nothing bad happens. The pilot reports a gps failure, air traffic guide her by radar towards the airport. When in range of the airport (assuming the weather is bad enough that the pilot can't see out the window) the pilot lands using the airport's instrument landing beacons.
There is slight disruption to traffic in the area due to slightly wider berth being given to our troubled aircraft, and the priority landing pattern.
(precise details made up - broad effect accurate)
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I'm pretty sure we would still have VFR, VOR/VORTAC, NBD/DME, etc.
Sure, it might be a bit more 'interesting' not running into anyone, but you hardly NEED gps (or radar) to get from A to B.
Links below, because having [wikipedia.org] fifteen times in the middle of the text is irritating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_flight_rules
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VORTAC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-directional_beacon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_measuring_equipment
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
They are talking about replacing the ground radar which generates the "blips" on ATC screens with "secondary" radar that just interrogates the plane's on-board GPS. They already interrogate the plane for ID, bearing and speed - this just adds the position and altitude from the plane. Obviously the GPS receiver and the transponder must be extremely reliable.
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You're missing the point. The idea behind GPS-driven ADS-B is that it REPLACES surveillance radar.
Here's how it works right now: The ground-based radar sends out a signal; it hits the aircraft and bounces back; ATC now knows which direction and how far away the aircraft is. On top of this, there is a transponder in the aircraft which sends back a coded number assigned by ATC, so that ATC can determine which dot on their radar screen is which aircraft. Additionally, if the transponder has (and has enabled) Mode C (which is required in most congested airspace), it sends back the aircraft's altitude. ATC now has a 3-dimensional fix on the aircraft, with positive verification as to who you are.
ADS-B gets rid of all of this. Instead, the aircraft has a GPS receiver, which gives itself a 3-dimensional fix in space. It transmits this information along with a unique identifier, when interrogated, to ATC. ATC utilizes this information to identify and track the aircraft in 3 dimensional space, as is now done with conventional radar/Mode C.
The problem is, what if GPS goes out? What if some pimply 17 year old kid buys a GPS jammer from Mexico and sets it up on his roof? Every aircraft in the area suddenly loses their ability to receive GPS signals, and all of a sudden ATC has no idea where any of the aircraft are. There is no backup system, because part of NexGen is the decommissioning of all primary surveillance radar.
THAT is the issue.
I can tell from reading the other comments here that my opinions will be in the minority, but I can personally testify how GOOD this system is.
I do flight testing of military aircraft, and we did a demo with several planes and helicopters a couple years ago on the "ADS-B" system, which is a component of NextGen. I've played with it inflight myself, and surveyed many pilots who used it. So you know I'm not blowing smoke, I won an award for a paper about this system at the 2006 Society of Flight Test Engineers annual symposium.
To give you some context about what NextGen and ADS-B do, here's the idea. (I think this description will be useful, since it appears most of the comments here demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge of the system... but this *IS* /. so I'm not surprised.)
Each plane is equipped with a transponder. It receives GPS position, and broadcasts a packet of data once per second (much more frequently than the usual radar sweep of 10-15 seconds) containing identity, position, aircraft type, speed, heading, altitude, and more.
With just a few thousand dollars worth of optional equipment, each plane can also recieve these broadcast packets of information DIRECTLY from other aircraft. In other words, an airplane will see what the other nearby airplanes are reporting too. Right now, a pilot has very little idea what is around his own plane - if the controller doesn't warn him, he doesn't know about it. The existing collision avoidance systems only show a rough approximation of what's in front of you at roughly the same altitude, but it's very error-prone (based on WWII-era-technology directional radio beacons), and hard to find the targets in many cases. But this sytem lets you see everything that the airspace controller is seeing, and almost instantly - once per second. We found the pilots experienced a four-fold increase in their ability to identify conflicting traffic in front of them, and for the first time were aware of overtaking traffic too (faster stuff coming up behind them).
The ground-based system rebroadcasts ALL of its data (including skin-paint targets) on a separate radio frequency, so any airplane (or even ground observers) can learn about everything in the airspace. Along with this data, it also uploads precipitation radar and other weather data, plus airport information. So the pilot has access to a vast amount of new information. And most of the systems have onboard maps with terrain mapping, helping to keep the pilot away from mountains and other dangerous "cumulo-granite" features.
For the pilot himself, the increase in situational awareness was simply amazing. The immediate and crystal clear presentation of the location of all nearby planes meant that he knew everything going on around him. For the ground controller, the much higher frequency updates combined with the much more detailed information about each plane means improved ability to track and direct those airplanes.
There ARE a few downsides, but they're vastly outweighed by the improvements. As some comments indicate, it does depend on GPS. Well, duh. But so do the navigation systems already onboard the airplanes... and cars... and commercial trucks... and ships... and trains. If GPS goes down, there will be much worse problems than this system going away. Despite what it sounds like, the radars are not going away - some will, but there will still be enough for "skin paint" and radar transponder tracking if needed (Congress and the FAA are not totally stupid). As to GPS jammers, note that the airplane is receiving the GPS data, and broadcasting its information on a totally separate frequency to the ground and to other aircraft. So any GPS jamming (since it's localized) will only affect a few airplanes, not the whole system. And by the way, all serious aircraft have multiple navigation systems; jamming GPS won't kill any airplanes, despite the alarmists.
Finally, let's talk about real-world - this system was installed in portions of Alaska around 2000-2001, as a
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My personal beef with it is the "personal electronics" thing. I use my phone to access aviation information (weather, databases, etc) and fail to see why I should stop just because a couple wankers couldn't stop playing Doom in the cockpit or whatever they were doing. Federal Aviation Regs *already* have clauses to deal with pilot stupidity, this is just extra bullshit with literally zero benefit.
The /. summary was incorrect (surprise surprise). The actual bill "bans pilots from using wireless devices or laptops in the cockpit that are unrelated to work." So you can still use your weather info. In fact, the MSP pilots were also doing work-related stuff so I don't know what ninny put that clause in as it doesn't even apply in a knee-jerk manner....
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
As somebody who knows and works with several private pilots, that statement is utterly false. Private aircraft are certainly not cheap, but they are definitely not out of reach of the middle class.
Just because *you* don't like them doesn't make those that do wrong. Do you have any statistics on GA fuel usage vs commercial vs automotive that I'm not aware of? I simply don't understand why you're hostile to general aviation. I certainly can agree with you on the over-reliance on commercial air travel. A better utilized rail system would do us some good here-- but private aircraft are most often flown as a hobby by regular people.
+1 Disagree