Over time, planners of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) for the United States expect situational awareness of all airport surface activity to be shared widely. The key safety objective is enabling controllers and pilots to reduce the risk of collisions in an airport’s designated movement area by observing and reacting to the same display of aircraft/vehicle trajectories. New details from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in early April show how the pieces will fit into place.
Guidance recently published in an FAA advisory circular (AC)1 targeting airport operators and other stakeholder groups explains how they can provide a critical element. Voluntarily equipping airport ground vehicles with automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast (ADS-B) transmitters is the optimal technology — in the long run — to accurately observe and identify surface vehicles in the movement area, the AC says. The agency e…
