Safe airport navigation (DET.5844)

The increase in air-traffic causes an increase in the number of runway incursions on airports. In reduced visibility, it becomes difficult to impossible for both the pilots and the ground controllers to timely detect incidents without electronic surveillance. Both in Europe and the United States near-term solutions to increase the surveillance capability of ground control are being developed and implemented.
Besides an improvement of the surveillance capability, a further increase in safety can be expected from the real-time integration and dissemination of information about the surface traffic. The enabling technologies are navigation, communication and data presentation. In contrast to the systems that enable automatic landing under all visibility conditions, at present aircraft are not equipped with electronic systems that support the pilot during airport navigation. The goal of the proposed project is to contribute to the international effort that focuses on the development of technological systems to enable safe airport navigation.
The proposed approach is to investigate the extent to which it is possible to compensate for the lack of visibility by electronic means. To address the resulting issues at the desired level of detail, the information bandwidth requirements for the various elements of the navigation task will be used to divide the operation into a number of functions, and for each function the information requirements will be addressed. Based on an analyses of the consequences of incorrect information, the requirements in terms of accuracy and reliability will be derived. Based on the resulting information requirements and an extrapolation of the current state-of-the-art in navigation and communication technology, the possibility to compensate for the reduction of the information resulting from the reduced visibility will be determined. The results will be used in the development of electronic navigation display formats for the support of the airport navigation task.

Er zijn 5 bedrijven bij dit project betrokken.