Sensis develops precision runway monitoring system and alternative to radar

Sensis Corporation, based in Syracuse, New York, the United States, is developing a runway monitoring system which allows planes to land simultaneously on closely spaced runways, thus putting an end to passengers having to sit inside an aircraft owing to delays in taxiing to the runway and in taking off.

According to Sensis Corporation – the company that provides sensors, information technology, and simulation and modeling to providers of the air transport service worldwide – the new tool to be installed at airports can handle increased traffic without the need to build more runways.

Marc Viggiano, chief operating officer of Sensis, says there are, on an average, 12 minutes of delay for every flight in the United States, and this has to be multiplied by 20 million flights a year.

Viggiano explains how the runway monitoring toll functions: It works with the air-traffic controllers, the airports as well as the airlines to develop a sequence, whereby each plane “gets a turn” in that as soon as a plane moves away from the gate, it taxis to the runway and then takes off.

The system being developed by Sensis uses multiple sensors in order to find an aircraft’s position, by updating it each second.

Though airlines cannot control delays caused by factors such as weather, he Sensis tool helps check delays that usually occur at the gate, or even better, inside the terminal, Marc Viggiano explains.

Sensis says it expects to deploy the new equipment within a year.

The project, co-funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA, also aims at reducing the quantity of fuel that aircraft burn while they are on the runway and waiting to take off. The engines are switched off when the plane is at the gate.

In another development, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has set up what it calls a “stopgap system” in Colorado that lets air-traffic controllers track planes in remote, mountainous areas where radar cannot reach. This technique – called the Wide-Area Multilateration (WAM) – will be used until the state-of-the-art, satellite-based ADS-B system gets operational in 2013.

The Wide-Area Multilateration, developed by Sensis Corporation, has received the FAA’s Initial Operating Capability (IOC) certification for deployment around 4 airports in the Rocky Mountains region of Colorado.

The WAM, according to Randy Babbitt, Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, “allows us to see aircraft that we could not see before” because of the rugged terrain, The new system, he adds, not only improves the efficiency and safety of the flights in a rugged territory but also saves time and money for both the passengers and airline operators.

According to Colorado’s Department of Transportation, 75 planes, on an average, get delayed every day in the region between the months of November and April.

The Wide-Area Multilateration system makes use of a network of around 20 small sensors that are deployed in remote areas. These sensors send out signals, which are received and then sent back by the aircraft’s transponders. The exact location of the plane is established by triangulating the distance and time measurements of the signals.