Vision on aviation surveillance systems

Summary form only given. The FAA's future aviation surveillance system is based on the use of various technological surveillance elements, each tailored to the airspace and capacity requirements within a particular geographic area. The Primary Surveillance Radar (PSR), Monopulse Secondary Surveillance Radar (MSSR), Mode S, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and ADS-Contract (C) are technologies that can provide the surveillance capabilities required for operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) well into the future. ADS-B and multilateration are under development as technologies that will be capable of supporting the Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS), by the provision of position and other aircraft/vehicle-derived data. ADS-B and/or ADS-C are suitable technologies to provide surveillance data in areas where currently no radar infrastructure exists or is not feasible. Current ground based surveillance functions (i.e., PSR, MSSR and Mode S), must provide independent verification of position information provided in the ADS-B messages, along with weather, intruders and blunder detection information. Future surveillance capabilities may be implemented to allow downlink aircraft parameters (DAP) to be used to improve ground based surveillance data processing (SDPS) systems and ATM thus allowing greater traffic capacity to be handled by the controller. In addition, ADS-B may be implemented to relieve the traffic load from the MSSR/Mode S systems where the density has slowly risen to such a level that the capacity of the secondary radar may limit future expansion.