General Aviation has been traditionally hampered by the expense and time required to get a pilot's license and the instrument rating required for flight in less-than-ideal weather. Modern digital flight control technologies greatly improve handling qualities and flight safety compared to the even best naturally stable, un-augmented aircraft designs. Digital Flight Control System (DFCS) represen...

Patient safety has become an important policy agenda in healthcare systems since publication of the 1999 report entitled "To Err Is Human." The paradigm has changed from blaming the individual for the error to identifying the weakness in the system that led to the adverse events. Anesthesia is one of the first healthcare specialties to adopt techniques and lessons from the aviation industry. Th...

As we become increasingly dependent on GPS for many position, navigation, and time (PNT) applications, it becomes increasingly important that we have an alternate means of obtaining those capabilities. This is especially important in critical applications such as aviation. As part of the ongoing Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Loran evaluation, the system is being assessed for its ability...

Future air traffic management systems are required to balance the conflicting objectives of maximizing safety and efficiency of traffic flows while minimizing the climate impact of aviation emissions and contrails. Integrating emission and climate models together with air traffic simulations improve the understanding of the complex interaction between the physical climate system, carbon and oth...

j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 1 0 www.insidegnss.com While the GNSS community at large looks forward to the addition of any new generation of navigation satellites, the first Block IIF satellite — launched in May 2010 and designated space vehicle number (SVN) 62 — marks an especially important step forward for the aviation community. Non-aviation applications may take advantage of GNSS receivers th...

The growth of air transport demand expected over the next decades, along with increasing frequency and intensity extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfalls severe storms due to climate change, will pose a tough challenge for traffic management systems, implications flight safety, delays passengers. In this context, Satellite-borne IN-situ Observations Predict Initiation Convection ATM (SIN...

Common Rules for Aviation Safety had been developed under the aegis of the Joint Aviation Authorities in the 1990s. In 2002 the Basic Regulation 1592/2002 was the founding document of a new entity, the European Aviation Safety Agency. Areas of activity were Certification and Maintenance of aircraft. On 18 March the new Basic Regulation 216/2008, repealing the original Basic Regulation was publi...

n The U.S. aviation system makes extensive use of national operational Doppler weather radar networks. These are critical for the detection and forecasting of thunderstorms and other hazardous weather phenomena, and they provide dense, continuously updated measurements of precipitation and wind fields as inputs to high-resolution numerical weather prediction models. This article describes recen...