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Aviation History
1949
1949 - 0903.PDF
• 588 FLIGHT Mw TIJIH, TELEVIEWED TRAFFIC-CONTROL American Television-Radar System Giving the Pilot Pictorial Situation Display IN much the same way that the fog-bound motoristwistfully dreams of some "magic eye" device capableof sundering the murk and allowing him to proceed unchecked, so many an airline pilot approaching his destination in low visibility has wished that a clearly defined picture might be presented to him of the approach zone and the status quo. Now, iJ: would appear, the dream is within measurable distance of be- coming a reality : the pilot's burden may b<* eased by giving him a visual picture of his own and other aircraft in the vicinity of his destination airport, together with approach paths, heading and wind vector. Thorough studies of some of the broader aspects of traffic control were made at the end of the war by several organ- izations in the United States, among them the Air Trans- port Association, the Airborne Instruments Laboratory, the C.A.A. and the Radio Corporation of America. Mounted in the cen- tre of the instrument panel, the 7-in dia- meter Teleran screen is dearly visible to each pilot. TECHNICALLY, the blind-navigation system described here ' is revolutionary : during its development it has aroused the greatest interest in America, but its reception in official quarters here is understood to have been some- what less enthusiastic ; European traffic-densities, of course, are not yet quite comparable with those of America. The description is digested from a paper by the inventor. The results of these studies and the various systems developed provided part of the background for the delibera- tions of what was known as Committee SC-31 of the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. During 1948, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Defense established the Air Navigation Development Board for the purpose of planning and sponsoring the development of a common national system of air navigation and traffic control. The Board is permanent and is using the report issued by the SC-31 Committee as its guide. One of the recommendations made by the Committee was that there should be ground radar equipment obtaining its responses from altitude-coded airborne responders. This equipment should be the chief source of data for traffic control and should produce a "pictorial situation display" for use on the ground and for transmission to each aircraft. It was specified that this display should be developed for all types of aircraft that fly on instruments and should be used in all phases of traffic control, i.e., initial approach, final approach and move- ment on the airport itself. The provision of pic- torial situation dis- / play to the extent specified in the SC-31 recommendations is given by a system known by the Fig. I. Typical fixed-block display. The aircraft In the penultimate approach-block is circling and will continue so to do until the block ahead is vacant. generic title "Teleran," originated by Mr. Loren F. Jones, of the Radio Corporation of America. Mr. Jones, pilot and engineer for 21 years, is a leading propo- nent of pictorial situation display, and in a paper published in the Aeronautical Engineering Review (February, 1949) he gives an exhaustive and admirably clear exposition of the subject. In the following notes we have abstracted from his paper those salient features of principal interest in the Teleran system. By providing the pilot with a television-like picture, some serious aspects of the aircraft instrumentation problem are resolved. There is no reason to regard the process of inter- preting instruments, scales, maps, aural ranges, verbal instructions and signals as being natural to a human being, but there is good reason to give man information in the form in which he has easily and conveniently acquired it for thousands of years—by vision of the pictorial type. Trie pilot thinks of his aircraft as a spot moving on a map. Uniquely, the television-like pictorial display does just that: it shows the pilot a special map of the area, the location of all aircraft at or near his altitude, where each is headed and which is his own, together with diagram- matic traffic control instructions. To form a pictorial display by Teleran, all information necessary for general navigation, traffic control, collision prevention, landing and taxying control is obtained on the ground and automatically com- bined into a pictorial display. Altitude segregation is used so that the pictures pre- sented to ground and airborne personnel concern single alti- tude-layers and are in a form well Fig. 2. Typical moving- block display. Circles are for fast aircraft, squares for slow aircraft. Pilot A needs to correct his potilion and Pilot B is in position at his predicted time at the boundary of the zone. n 14
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