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significantly increase lateral and horizontal separation standards to keep everyone safe, wasting time and fuel, while also reducing the number of aircraft able to use a given chunk of airspace. There are still plenty of airports around where a departure sits on the ground until an arriving IFR aircraft cancels its flight plan. Without radar information, it’s also nearly impossible for ATC to locate an airplane should they lose radio contact. Think Malaysian flight 370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board that went missing in March 2016 and was never found.
The advantage of using Global Positioning System (GPS) based ADS-B is its talent for accurately pinpointing aircraft anywhere on earth at nearly any altitude, provided of course that ADS-B receivers can hear the signal. With space-based receivers augmenting the ones already installed on earth, those ADS-B signals won’t be lost, unless the transponder is disabled for some reason.
While ADS-B receivers on satellites can’t completely prevent another aircraft from going missing, the new system will mean no airplane should ever again go missing with ATC wondering about their last known position. With an ADS-B based ATC system, controllers will see precise position updates as often as once every 15 minutes in the North Atlantic where testing is now in full swing.
In order to make this new-age ATC system viable everywhere, including the U.S., Iridium sells the ADS-B information its satellites receive to a partnership of ATC service providers around the world such as Nav Canada, NATS in the U.K., ENAV (Italy), the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) and Naviair (Denmark), as well as Iridium, through a new company called Aireon. Working together with Flight Aware, a name already familiar for aircraft tracking data, ATC providers will more easily track an airplane’s callsign, airspeed and altitude, its magnetic heading and transponder code. This positive location information will allow ATC to separate airplanes in areas that were once invisible to them. And the price for entry in this new system doesn’t require extensive aircraft modifications other than what operators are already doing to meet the 2020 mandate.
What It All Means for ATC
Aireon’s supplemental data will appear seamless to air traffic controllers on their radar screens. All controllers will realize is they can now see aircraft data blocks moving across their screens in areas where they never could in the past.
That means when you’re piloting your King Air into Aspen in the not-too-distant future, ATC will be able to follow your flight nearly down to the ground on
TSO High Altitude FAA Approved Mask
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Phone (800) 237-6902 www.aerox.com
JULY 2019
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 17