Cockpit display could reduce air collisions

17 Jun 2002

A cockpit display system being developed at Michigan Technological University would alert pilots of small planes about other aircraft in the vicinity and drasticallyreduce the number of mid-air collisions, says project leader Dr. Jeffrey Burl of Michigan Tech's Department of Electrical Engineering. Burl's project is being fundedby a 2-year, $90,000 grant from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Burl says large commercial aircraft use Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems (TCAS) to keep track of other aircraft in the vicinity. These systems allow the computersin those planes to "talk back and forth to one another" and afford a high degree of safety. But they are also very expensive, costing about $100,000 a unit. Burl saysthe system he is developing includes a passive radar that detects and decodes Global Positioning System (GPS) squitter signals transmitted by other aircraft and isalso capable of decoding Traffic Information System (TIS) uplink data received from ground radar units.

The system will primarily use TIS information where ground radar is available, according to Burl. In these environments, GPS squitter data will serve to validate TISinformation and serve as a backup to the TIS system. In non-radar environments, GPS squitter information is used as the primary source of traffic information.