Leeham News and Analysis
There's more to real news than a news release.
Leeham News and Analysis
- RTX Q1 2025 Earnings: GTF Talk Takes A Back Seat To Tariffs April 22, 2025
- Tariffs Tumult Takes Over GE Aerospace Q1 2025 Earnings Call April 22, 2025
- Boeing reports mixed results of latest employee survey, but middle management and officers remain key obstacles April 22, 2025
- Hopes for 1Q financial progress turns into bumpy ride for Boeing April 21, 2025
- Bjorn’s Corner: Air Transport’s route to 2050. Part 18. April 18, 2025
Bjorn’s Corner: Asia-Pacific Air Traffic Management
June 24 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Having covered the Air Traffic Management challenges in North America, Europe and Middle East we will now finish the series by looking at some specific problems affecting the Asia-Pacific region.
Asia-Pacific is the world region with the strongest growth in air traffic. IATA calculates that within 20 years half of the world’s air travel will originate or terminate within the region. Figure 1 shows that air traffic has several hot spots in Asia-Pacific, but also that there are areas with rather moderate traffic.
Figure 1. Air traffic’s main routes in the world. Asia-Pacific is an area with large differences in air traffic intensity. Source: Rockwell Collins
The region has its unique set of Air Traffic Management problems. We will now cover those that must be solved, should the region’s Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) be able to manage the forecasted growth in air travel in a safe way. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: The Middle East Air Traffic Management
By Bjorn Fehrm
June 17 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Having covered the Air Traffic Management challenges that are present in the North American and European airspaces, we will now put the light on another air traffic hot spot, the Middle East.
Figure 1 show that air traffic is more intense over the US and Europe airspaces but that there are main crossroads to Asia and Africa that take their route over the Middle East, and the area has hot spots.
Figure 1. Air traffic’s main routes in the world. Middle East is an area with hot spots. Source: Rockwell Collins
As we have seen, the technical solutions are well on their way to enable the implementation of a modern and efficient Air Traffic Management. Both the US and European air space modernization is hinging on how well the human factors change process can be accomplished (in the US budgets are also a hindrance).
If we add political factors to the jam, we have a good description of the situation in the Middle East. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: SES, Single European Sky
By Bjorn Fehrm
June 10, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Last week I wrote about the practical implementation of the next generation Air Traffic Management (ATM) that is possible with the new technology based on ADS-B transponders. My examples were from the implementation of the US NextGen Air Traffic Management.
The US has the advantage that the airspace has one Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP), i.e. one organization for the Air Traffic Controllers. We will now look at the next generation Air Traffic Management in Europe where the project is called SES, Single European Sky. I wrote about SESAR, Single European Sky ATM Research, last week. This is the technology project for implementing ADS-B based ATM, SES is the European Union initiative involving all ANSPs in Europe in the change process.
Figure 1. Proposed division of airspace in Europe to implement SES/SESAR. Source: Eurocontrol
Presently Europe is divided into 37 ANSPs (the US airspace has one). The ANSPs operate within the national borders of the European states, each serving its own country. SES has proposed to change the present 37 Functional Airspace Blocks (FABs) to 9, Figure 1 Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: Transponders, the kingpin of safe air navigation, Part 3.
By Bjorn Fehrm
June 3, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Over the past few weeks, we have described how transponders go from being little more capable than the WW2 IFF that they were developed from, to how they will act as information beacons, sending the aircraft’s ID, position and speed to all surrounding listeners every second.
The consequences of this change are nothing short of revolutionary. From a situation where the ground controller or adjacent aircraft had scarce information on the multitude of aircraft they tried to track, Figure 1, they can now receive all the information they need from the aircraft under observation.
Figure 1. NASA simulation of air traffic over US on a normal day. Source: NASA
This, together with other technologies like data link-based communication, will change Air Traffic Management as we know it.
Bjorn’s Corner: Transponders, the kingpin of safe air navigation, Part 2
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 27, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: In last week’s Corner, I started to describe how the aircraft Transponder grew out of the military IFF and how it gradually became a very important part of current Air Traffic Management (ATM).
We will now dwell deeper on the most capable transponder type, the mode S type. We will describe how this is available in versions which give Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) info on what the airliner is doing and how it’s further developed from an aid for air navigation to be the kingpin for all future air navigation.
Figure 1. A classical transponder for general aviation aircraft. Source: Garmin.
Figure 1 shows a classical transponder how most General Aviation and Commuter aircraft pilots know them, a narrow panel in the avionics stack. In airliners they are more integrated into the overall cockpit concept but their functionality is the same.
How the transponder developed to be the primary tool for safe air traffic is a bit involved, but we will take it in steps.
Bjorn’s Corner: Transponders, the kingpin of safe air navigation
By Bjorn Fehrm
May 19, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: In my recent Corners, I have been describing how a modern airliner navigates using a Flight Management System, (FMS or Computer, FMC) to navigate along the flight plan and how it finally uses an instrument landing system to safely land the aircraft even in bad weather.
When looking into instrument landing systems, we have described the legacy systems which require large ground installations (such as ILS) and how these can be replaced in the future with smarter concepts using GPS based procedures.
I will now continue on this path and describe some of the additional cornerstone technologies needed to implement a modernized Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, which can replace today’s systems that have their roots in World War 2 (WW2) technology.
We will start today with how aircraft can be seen from the ground or other aircraft without visual sight or Radar contact. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: Landing after navigation, Part 2
By Bjorn Fehrm
13 May 2016, © Leeham Co: Last week we started to describe what is necessary to make a precision approach after a flight. We described the rather elaborate installations needed for the classical precision approach with an ILS system. It requires two transmitters and large antennae installations for each runway.
We will now describe the system which will replace ILS as worldwide instrument landing system, an augmented Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), where GPS is the variant provided by the US Department of Defence, Figure 1. Other GNSS are Russia’s GLONASS and Europe’s Galilleo.
Figure 1. The GPS system consists of up to 24 satellites which deliver position, velocity and time. Source: Wikipedia.
The problem with a non-augmented GPS is the precision. Classically the accuracy was worst case any where in the World around 100m horizontally and 150m vertically, but that was when the US military deliberately reduced the accuracy for civil use (Selective Availability). Today this deliberate reduction has stopped and the accuracy is 25m horizontally and 43m vertically worst case.
This is not enough for a precision approach. We will now describe what is done to bring the accuracy to a level where precision approaches can be flown with GPS. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: Landing after navigation
By Bjorn Fehrm
6 May 2016, ©. Leeham Co: In a recent Corner, we covered how to navigate a modern airliner with the help of the Flight Management System (FMS). We described how the FMS uses different navigation receivers to fly the aircraft via the autopilot along the flight plan. In the end, we used a special instrument landing system to land at the Nice Airport.
The classical way to land on airports in bad weather has been to use a VHF based Instrument Landing Systems called ILS. Figure 1 shows the large installations of transmitter antennas which are necessary to get such an ILS beam to fly on for landing at a runway.
Figure 1. Antennae to form the lateral ILS localiser beam for a runway. Source: Wikipedia.
The antennae we see are only for the lateral beam, the Localiser. It guides us in the horizontal plane. There is a second transmitter with associated antennae which forms the vertical beam so that we have a two dimensional glide path to land on, with the vertical part called a glide slope.
It’s clear that it’s costly to install such ILS equipment for each runway for an airport. There have not been good alternatives to the classical ILS system until now. Several alternative systems have been proposed based on shorter wave signals to get the size of the antennae down (Microwave Landing Systems, MLS), but these have not caught on outside of military use.
Now there are good alternatives being developed. These are all based on GPS systems, with more or less advanced implementations. Read more
Bjorn’s Corner: C Series flight controls
By Bjorn Fehrm
29April 2016, ©. Leeham Co: With the order by Delta Air Lines, the Bombardier C Series has taken the step up to be a viable alternative to Airbus’ and Boeing’s single aisle 130-150 seat aircraft.
In my description of airliners’ flight control and Flight Management Systems (FMS), I have focused on the established mainline single aisle players. Time to change that; C Series has arrived and will stay in the mainline segment.
Why 130 seats as a limit? Because below 130 seats there are a number of additional players (Embraer, Sukhoi, Mitsubishi…) and we can’t describe them all right now.
Now to how Bombardier has implemented the flight controls, autopilot and FMS for the C Series. In fact, we will look at how they have made the C Series cockpit, Figure 1.
Figure 1. C Series flight deck. Source: Bombardier.
I haven’t flown the C Series yet (working on it!) but I have been able to glean quite a bit over time and spent quite some time in the cockpit with the Bombardier test pilots at the Paris Air Show.
So here is a shot at describing the C Series control philosophies and capabilities and how they mimic/differ from Airbus and Boeing.
Bjorn’s Corner: We fly to Nice
By Bjorn Fehrm
22 April 2016, ©. Leeham Co: Last week we described the function of the aircraft’s Flight Management System, FMS. Now we will use the FMS to program a flight between Innsbruck in Austria and my hometown Nice on the French Riviera.
To make it practical and easy to follow, we will focus on how the Flightplan that we have programmed into the FMS will be processed. To follow that, we look at the display of the FMS navigation on the aircraft’s navigation display. There, one can follow how the FMS and Autopilot work through all the information that a flight-planned mission contains.
The cockpit we see in the picture is the aircraft we will use, an A319 that we have borrowed for the day from Lufthansa, just to help us understand how navigation with a FMS works. It is of course not a real aircraft, but it’s not far from it.
Figure 1. Our flight for the day, Aerosoft’s A319. Source: Aerosoft’s A319 flight simulator
The best flight simulators that are available for your PC today are extremely well done and realistic; this is one of them. It’s an A319 simulator from the German company Aerosoft. I flew the mission for us yesterday.
Let’s see how it works.