University well ahead in race for new navigation aid

University Well Ahead In Race For New Navigation Aid

CNHI News Service

By Randall Turk

Transcript Business Editor

A company based on University of Oklahoma technology continues to test a navigation aid that could someday revolutionize how aircraft take off and land in bad weather.

The OU company, Leading Edge Navigation Solutions LLC, is working to have its prototype tested and certified well before much larger and wealthier companies can develop and market theirs, said John Fagan, OU professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The local area augmentation system (LAAS) is being produced to make information from the global navigation satellite system much more useful in providing precision approaches at airports. The LAAS, which has undergone development and testing at Westheimer Airport since 1998, could one day be used as the primary means of aircraft navigation, Fagan said.

At a monthly luncheon meeting of the Norman Chamber of Commerce Aviation Committee last week, Fagan said the LAAS the testing program is a cooperative effort involving the Federal Aviation Administration Flight Standards Office and the OU School of Aviation. The testing involves system integrity checks and precision correction of satellite position signals. The long-term goal is to have FAA-certified airport approaches for LAAS-guided instrument flights by next year.

“We could not have developed this technology without the OU Aviation School,” Fagan said. Essentially, OU aviation students are testing the accuracy of LAAS during training flights, he said.

LAAS will have the capability of augmenting or replacing much costlier instrument landing systems (ILS) at airports, Fagan said. “The system is more precise than an ILS, which costs two million dollars for one runway. Our LAAS will cost about $750,000 and cover all approaches to the host airport and other airports in the area.”

Among its other advantages, the LAAS can develop more complex airport approaches because the system can be used to calculate “bends” to guide aircraft around obstacles — a capability not available with ILS, Fagan said.

The purpose of LAAS is to overcome deficiencies in the government’s wide area augmentation system (WAAS), which relies on global positioning satellite information “that isn’t very accurate,” he said.

The LAAS is similar to the (WAAS) developed to correct errors in the Global Positioning System (GPS). The 32 GPS satellites circling the globe and transmitting location data have a margin of error of plus or minus 50 meters because satellite signals are “bent” when they reach earth, and satellite orbits wobble, Fagan said.

WAAS equipment calculates the error and fine tunes GPS data to provide a margin of error of plus or minus 5 meters — a substantial improvement in accuracy but still not precise enough to guide landing aircraft.

The LAAS ground station picks up WAAS data and feeds it into a computer at OU. The corrected location information gives aircraft lateral and vertical guidance in bad weather. LAAS sends up a beam transmitted to aircraft receivers that provides a more precise landing path. LAAS data are accurate to within 1.5 meters, Fagan said.

The cone-shaped airport approach path or “chute” produced by LAAS is much narrower than one prescribed by a conventional ILS, Fagan said. “LAAS confines approaching aircraft to a very tight area and provides much better safety than any ILS.”

Commercialization of “the world’s first LAAS” could not be far away, if not upstaged by a competitor with much greater resources, Fagan said. “We are trying to create a partnership between the university, a technology development manufacturer and airlines.

“In Guam, we’re assembling a precise approach system for Continental Airlines and their Pacific fleet.”

Fagan said other airports willing to cooperate in using LAAS include Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers World Airport, Kennedy Airport in New York, and major airports in Memphis and Juneau.

He said only one much larger competitor is working to develop a LAAS system but has produced nothing yet. “All our agreements with suppliers are in place,” he said.

Research funding is another weakness a competitor might exploit, he said. “We’ve spent less than a million dollars on research. We’re looking for capital.”

Still, the future looks promising for the LAAS being tested at Westheimer. “We’re considered the gold standard for LAAS,” Fagan said. “The FAA flies by it.”