Sunday, February 20, 2011

Raytheon Helps India’s Future ATM

William L. Blair, President of Raytheon India talks to ShowNews’ Neelam Mathews, about the progress of GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN), which Raytheon is developing with the Indian Space
Research Organization (ISRO) and Airports Authority of India (AAI).

ShowNews: Do you think that an integrated Air Traffic Management would be a better idea for Indian airports? If so, why?
Wm. Blair: The integration of the ATM with the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and GAGAN would be a great benefit to the Indian air traffic management approach. Raytheon has a solution to integrate the GAGAN with ADS-B and present the information to the air-traffic management community to provide a signal with integrity to both the aircraft and the controller.

SN: How many reference stations have been completed?
WB: All 15 Indian Reference Station (NRES) sites have been finished and Site Acceptance Tests have been
successfully completed. The secondary communications circuits and the backup circuits are presently being installed by the Airports Authority of India to these sites. Preliminary System Acceptance Test (PSAT) was successfully completed on Dec. 11, 2010.

SN: What is the status of the prototype algorithm being developed? What are the problems being faced regarding the detection of ionospheric depletions in the magnetic equatorial region that may be utilized in the user receiver data processing for the GAGAN program?
WB: In order to simplify the user receiver design and allow for legacy user receivers to be used over the Indian airspace, the approach selected by AAI/ISRO does not require changes in the user receivers from current configurations. This will shorten the timeframe needed for certification and allow for much earlier use of the system, as user receiver changes to firmware will not be required. The depletion algorithm will be implemented in the ground equipment.

SN: When will the project be completed, or rather, the first phase? It was to ready by June 2010.
WB: We still expect the current build-up of the system to complete by the end of June of this year as planned. This includes the already completed tasks of hardware installation, integration and algorithm selection as well as the PSAT, which was completed in December. Significant progress has been made in algorithm design,  and it is on track for completion by June of this year. After June, implementing the algorithms in software, installing new software, and the preparation for certification, will be performed

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