1 year extension to ADS-B Traffic Display Trial at Barton

Steve Hutt • 21 April 2020

in community General Aviation

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Airspace4All GA Airfield ATS ADS-B Traffic Display Trial

The UK CAA has today, 20th April 2020, granted an extension to the permission allowing City Airport (Manchester Barton) to use the ADS-B ground receiver technology implemented as part of the Airspace4All GA Airfield ATS ADS-B Traffic Display Trial. Barton’s current permission (which was due to expire on 30th April 2020) has been extended for 12 months, until 30th April 2021. Without this permission, use of such technology is outside of current regulations covering GA airfield air traffic services.

Airspace4All delivered the report on the Trial to the CAA at the end of September 2019 and had hoped that the CAA’s assessment and development of regulations to authorise permanent use of this technology by all UK GA airfields would have been completed by the end of April 2020. This new extension facilitates continued use while awaiting the anticipated regulatory amendments, making allowance for the demands placed on the CAA to address the enormous impact that COVID-19 is having on aviation.

https://airspace4all.org/1-year-extension-to-ads-b-traffic-display-trial-at-barton/

Comments (3)

Keith Vinning • 4 years ago

Hi Steve, that's good news. You mentioned previously that the ability to have good situational awareness "had a positive effect on the well being and confidence' of the controllers. This is very much my experience as well.

However, ADSB has a low uptake compared with other systems in the GA Fleet, as shown in The Airspace for All report of January 2020. Therefore, why is the trial not including the reception of the other more popular EC devices?

https://airspace4all.org/reports/ec-data-collection-at-laa-rally-2019/

The data collected manually and verified electronically, showed that the majority of aircraft had Mode-S which represented 60% of attendees. PilotAware and Flarm represented nearly 30% of aircraft equipped.

The conversion of Mode-S transponders to ADSB using an inexpensive (SIL=0) GPS has been a great success amongst those users of Mode-S transponders with extended squitter, thanks in no small part to the work that you have done over the past 4 years.

However, should not the reception of all types of aircraft be included in the trail at Barton and extended to others for the following reasons?
(i) It's possible to do it now.
(ii) It is already done in more than 20 sites in the UK (Not for Air Traffic Control and Management of course)
(iii) It is a trial and therefore the accuracy of detection and obscuration rates can be compared between systems.
(iii) Best practice in human factors can be speeded up as more data will be available.

Perhaps in Europe as well as the UK, this is a community. EASA site?

Please Note I have to declare an interest here in that I represent PiloAware Ltd who provided the ATOM base stations for the LAA Trial that collected the information mentioned for the above LAA Rally.
The ATOM base station detects all EC transmitted including ADSB, Mode-S, Mode-C, PilotAware, Flarm and Fanet+ transmissions. MLAT data is used to provide the 3D location of all detected Mode-S traffic.

Steve Hutt • 4 years ago

Hi Keith,
I think you know the answer to that already.

Extending the trial beyond ADS-B is not in my gift. It is the UK CAA that authorise which technical standards can be used as a basis for officially licensed air traffic services.

Regards,
Steve

Keith Vinning • 4 years ago

Thanks Steve. I understood from a meeting with the CAA last year that the trial was to be extended to include the other technologies this Summer. I'll contact them to see if this is the case. It would be good to have a comparison.

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