Airport Traffic

[Casey Hawthorne]

Posted in this newsgroup, since Java might be needed to tie all these
parts together.

Is it possible at airports for planes to broadcast their GPS
information to each other, including their other information, like
orientation, velocity, acceleration, etc?

Say on one frequency with FDM and/or on a few frequencies?
Each plane keeps its own sideband/frequency until it lands.
Frequencies/sidebands are assigned on a cyclic basis.

Could cell phone technology be used?
On different frequencies, than regular cell and with towers clustered
close to the airport and landing pattern area.

For disply technology, could a 3D LED lattice (box/globe) be used,
with enough space between the LEDs so that the pilot can see LEDs on
the far side of the lattice?

Red - Very Close planes
Yellow - Close Planes
Green - "Safe" Enough distance

--
Regards,
Casey

[Daniel Pitts]

Casey Hawthorne wrote:
> Posted in this newsgroup, since Java might be needed to tie all these
> parts together.

Java is but one language that could be used. I don't think it would be
"needed", but it might be the best fit...

>
> Is it possible at airports for planes to broadcast their GPS
> information to each other, including their other information, like
> orientation, velocity, acceleration, etc?

Possible? Probably, in software *almost* everything is possible.
Feasible? Not my area of expertise, but I would suspect that as long as
the data was available to the plane itself, it could be transmitted.

>
> Say on one frequency with FDM and/or on a few frequencies?
> Each plane keeps its own sideband/frequency until it lands.
> Frequencies/sidebands are assigned on a cyclic basis.

Sounds a bit like DHCP in IP networks :-)

>
> Could cell phone technology be used?

Doubt it, there are federal laws that ban cell phone use on planes,
specifically because of concerns over RF interference.

> On different frequencies, than regular cell and with towers clustered
> close to the airport and landing pattern area.

Why use cell phone technology if you're going to use different
frequencies? For as big a project as this sounds like, it might make
sense to use some other transport. There may already be information
transport between planes and airports. I don't know.

>
> For disply technology, could a 3D LED lattice (box/globe) be used,
> with enough space between the LEDs so that the pilot can see LEDs on
> the far side of the lattice?
>
> Red - Very Close planes
> Yellow - Close Planes
> Green - "Safe" Enough distance

It seems that this wouldn't be useful to a pilot. Very Close could mean
"a plane just went under you, pull up" or "A plane is headed straight
for you, bank left." Some sort of display that shows you where planes
are relative to you might be useful, but would probably be more of a
distraction.

--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>

[Roedy Green]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:04:45 GMT, Casey Hawthorne
<caseyhHA...@istar.ca> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

>Is it possible at airports for planes to broadcast their GPS
>information to each other, including their other information, like
>orientation, velocity, acceleration, etc?

A digital system could work much like Ethernet does, the old Aloha
network did/does, or like modern packet cell phone protocols do.

Instead of assigning frequencies long term to users, you broadcast a
short burst over multiple frequencies. Collision detect triggers
retransmit. It might work like multicast.

Modems broadcast on many frequencies at once. They intelligently
temporarily stop using noisy channels.

In the system you propose, there is just a trickle of data, but you
want to make sure it gets through no matter what the atmosphere is
doing.

Heavy error-correcting codes might play a big role.

--

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com