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Aviation History
1953
1953 - 0132.PDF
130 FLIGHT ARTIFICIAL RADAR Dual-purpose M.C.A. Equipment for Training Controllers 'FLIGHT" Photographs WHILE Government officials are frequently attacked for extravagance, they rarely receive any credit for saving the taxpayer's money. Thus it seems only fair, in describing a new synthetic-radar device which will effect considerable savings in the training of air traffic control officers, to give full credit to its originators—namely Mr. J. Fenwick, A.M.I.E.E., and Mr. W. M. Maskell. Mr. Fenwick is signals officer in charge at the M.C.A. Air Traffic Control Experimental Unit, which is stationed at London Airport. From a traffic-control viewpoint, Mr. Fenwick's trainer corresponds to the flight-simulator used to such good effect by the airlines in that it reproduces certain required aspects of aircraft behaviour without the need to use real aircraft. It produces on the screen of a surveillance radar realistic "blips" representing the flight-paths of a number of air craft; all the data normally supplied by the transmitter and aerial are fed into the display screen of the radar console artificially. Reproduction is so faithful, however, that the trainer can be used to provide traffic-control students with experience virtually identical to that afforded by using com plete radar equipment and genuine aircraft—at only a frac tion of the cost. Use of the new trainer will involve a complete re-organiza tion of training methods at the Ministry's air-traffic-control school at Hum. The previous practice has been to train A.T.C. officers either as traffic directors or talk-down con trollers as required. The duration of the course was eight weeks, six officers being trained as traffic directors and two as talk-down controllers. The new policy will be to train all officers entering the radar field for the first time as traffic directors; they will attend talk-down control courses after gaining operation experience. The new course will last six weeks and the intake will be increased from eight students to 12—eight traffic directors and four talk-down controllers. The radar trainer will not only permit the number of aircraft hours flown per course to be reduced from 200 to 150 hours, but will allow traffic directors to spend many more hours at the console at no extra cost, and will give them experience of controlling up to three "aircraft" at the same time. Previously this was impossible, due to the prohibitive cost of putting three training aircraft into the air simultaneously. Incident ally, light single-engined aircraft are not suitable for this work. As the complete trainer can be constructed for something like £8,000, it will obviously pay for itself before very long The surveillance radar screen shows the range and bearing, but not the elevation, of an aircraft. At present, therefore, it is not possible to simulate the final stage of a ground- controlled approach. The A.T.C.E.U. is at present engaged in developing a synthetic precision-approach radar. In addition to its advantages as a cheap method of training radar operators, the trainer also promises economies in another role—as a "test bed" for new control-zone and approach procedures. The ability to vary the speed and manoeuvrability of the synthetic aircraft makes it possible to apply such procedures to the actual performance of machines such as the Stratocruiser or Comet without spending any thing up to £500 per hour for the loan of the airliner. In its initial form, the radar simulator will reproduce the movements of six synthetic aircraft, but it is planned to increase this number to 20. It is, of course, recognized that it will not altogether dispense with the need for "five" tests of new radar procedures; it will, however, involve only a fraction of the cost, making possible constant repetition of procedures and the simulation of traffic problems which could not be tried out with live aircraft. Several synthetic radar devices were produced for train ing purposes during the war, and these were reviewed by the M.C.A. experimental staff before embarking on design work. They found, however, that none of the existing designs was suitable for their purpose and Mr. Fenwick built a "mock-up" trainer from spare parts (at a total cost of 9s) to prove his original theory. The finished trainer, as demonstrated recently at London Airport before being trans ferred to Hum, embodies equipment—housed in four enclosed racks—capable of producing reflections represent ing four aircraft. Position and range of the synthetic aircraft are electro-mechanically calculated and the angular positions of shafts representing range and bearing are used to produce a short pulse appearing in the correct position on the screen of a M.E.W. (microwave early-warning) surveillance radar. All the data normally obtained with radar of this type are produced artificially—aerial-turning information, timing- base trigger, range markers and permanent echoes (natural reflections caused by obstructions in the neighbourhood of the transmitter). The heading, rate of turn, air speed and initial position of all four aircraft can be altered independently by the "pilot" operating the remote control panel. The capacity of the trainer to simulate the behaviour of This control-panel (left) is one of four supplied with the new M.C.A. radar trainer; it enables an instructor to determine the precise behaviour of an "aircraft" on the surveillance-radar screen. The originators of the device are (right) J. Fenwick (seated) and W. M. Maskell; on their right are glimpsed racks containing equipment for feeding artificial echoes into the radar display (a new type of 12in screen developed by the A.T.C.E.U.).
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