Low Cost General Aviation Traffic Information System

This proposal presents an innovative design for a traffic information and collision avoidance system for general aviation aircraft. While there are many ongoing programs to improve situational awareness, the majority of the research is aimed at commercial aviation and high end users, and will require expensive technological solutions. General aviation has the same needs -- to improve situational awareness and therefore improve safety, but most general aviation aircraft owners cannot afford the types of solutions that are being evaluated for commercial aviation. There is a need to provide GA pilots with traffic information, cost-effectively, at the nation's 5,134 public use airports. In this proposal we present a low-cost solution that can provide the vast majority of GA users with the ability to identify and locate other traffic in the terminal area. Depending on whether the aircraft is equipped with a moving map display or only a VHF radio, the service will either show the location of proximate transponder equipped aircraft on the map display or will provide aural alerting only. This proposal combines Rannoch's pioneering work in aircraft tracking technology with Potomac Airfield's pioneering work with VHF pilot alerting to provide a complete solution with two levels of service.