I TOUCHED BRIEFLY ON THE evolution of runway visual range (more commonly known as “RVR”) in my article about approach light systems (“Lights, Camera, Action!” August IFRR). This article discusses low-visibility operations and the differences between visibility and RVR, both from the regulatory and operational viewpoints. Because some readers make their living by flying under “for-hire” rules, I...

A full scale snow melting system with heat pipe technology is built in this work, which avoids the negative effects on concrete structure and environment caused by traditional deicing chemicals. The snow melting, ice-freezing performance and temperature distribution characteristics of heat pipe concrete runway were discussed by the outdoor experiments. The results show that the temperature of t...

In order to help determine the required visual frame rate for the design of remote/virtual airport towers, thirteen active air traffic controllers viewed high dynamic-fidelity simulations of landing aircraft and decided whether the aircraft would stop before the end of the runway, as if to be able to make a runway turnoff. The viewing conditions and simulation dynamics replicated visual rates a...

DLR has set up a number of projects to increase flight safety and economics of aviation. Within these activities one field of interest is the development and validation of systems for pilot assistance in order to increase the situation awareness of the aircrew. The basic idea behind these systems is the principal of an ''electronic co-pilot''. All flight phases ("gate-to-gate") are taken into a...

A knowledge-based system for scheduling arrival traffic in the terminal area, referred to as the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST), has been implemented and operationally tested at the Dallas/Fort Worth Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility. Two types of controller advisories are generated by FAST: sequence number and runway assignment. The knowledge base for runway assignment empl...

The friction force for aircraft landing is mainly provided by the texture of runway surfaces. mechanism underlying generation energy dissipation tire rubber materials during random excitation induced asperities. However, surface deteriorated cyclic loading and environmental effects service life a runway, leading to loss braking extension distance. Additionally, when an lands on wet at high velo...

This work addresses the challenge of providing precise runway-relative position, velocity and orientation reference to a landing aircraft based on monocular camera low-cost inertial sensor data complemented by barometric readings. GPS information is excluded from this set because it intended use developed estimator for Instrumental Landing System fault detection. The characteristic size runway ...

Considerable progress has been made over the last 15 years on building adaptive control systems to assist pilots in flying damaged aircraft. Once a pilot has regained control of a damaged aircraft, the next problem is to determine the best site for an emergency landing. In general, the decision depends on many factors including the actual control envelope of the aircraft, distance to the site, ...

Considerable progress has been made over the last 15 years on building adaptive control systems to assist pilots in flying damaged aircraft. Once a pilot has regained control of a damaged aircraft, the next problem is to determine the best site for an emergency landing. In general, the decision depends on many factors including the actual control envelope of the aircraft, distance to the site, ...