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Aviation History
1959
1959 - 0515.PDF
252 FLYING AIDS . . . FLIGHT, 20 February 1959 to be installed, after testing, at Jdlewild during 1960 and the otheris for an analogous terminal/ transition portion. Several sectors of the Air Route Traffic Control Center at New York Internationalare to be moved to Atlantic City to take part in the "live" trials and Aircraft Armaments, Inc., are to supply an ambitious simu-lator. The G.P.L. contract was obtained after submission of 14 other bids by a total of 31 companies, including Sperry Rand andInternational Business Machines. Allen B. Dumont laboratories are converting an existing building at NAFEC into an extensivelaboratory to house the system and its simulator. Equipment is to be installed this spring and trials will begin during the summer. Last June, Radio Corporation of America received a contractworth $1,400,939, for the development of another key item in the traffic control system, namely, the Automatic Ground-Air-GroundCommunication System (AGACS) which is a data link for either V.H.F. or U.H.F. frequencies. Prototype equipment is to be delivered by next July to 'allowevaluation and completion of testing by the end of 1961. After that, AGACS will be installed as part of the System in New York.The data link will be compatible with existing communications equipment and a detailed study of amplitude modulation tech-niques, identification coding and recognition circuitry is now being made by R.C.A. Special airborne data displays for linkinformation sent from the ground are to be developed and a Phase III version using more advanced principles is to be begun in 1960. AGACS will also be integrated with "experimental navigationsubsystems made up of ground and airborne components in dif- ferent degrees of sophistication" intended to provide a form ofarea-coverage and, thereby, track freedom. Doppler, simplified inertial systems and dead-reckoning equipment in combinationwith ground aids are envisaged. The Technical Development Center at Indianapolis was alreadyworking with a number of different methods of entering and dis- playing information for A.T.C. centres and much of this is to becontinued and, if possible, incorporated in the G.P.L. Data Pro- cessing Central. The equipment includes the Stromberg CarlsonCharactron radar display, a Sage console, electro-mechanical dis- play boards, magnetic-drum stores, scan conversion equipmentand the UNIVAC file computer. The scan conversion system was originally adapted by intercontinental Electronics Corp., from aFrench system for converting a radar presentation electronically into a TV picture which could be viewed in daylight conditions.A memory function is incorporated so that targets can be shown with trailing echoes to indicate their course. Some 20 of theseunits have been ordered, nine of them costing $1,632,638. A further 39 scan conversion units have been ordered from AdmiralCorp., of Chicago, for $5,729,116. These will be able to retain a radar echo on the screen for any time up to 30 minutes and willalso show a trailing echo to indicate course. They are to be delivered during the next nine months and will be installed inexisting ARTCCs. Raytheon is supplying about a score of the 50 or so surveillanceradars which will virtually blanket the airways. Another contract worth $1,786,124 has been placed with Airborne InstrumentsLaboratory for ten Airport Surface Detection Equipment radars which will transmit at 24,000 Mc/s with a beam-width of 0.25 degfrom an aerial housed within a fabric "blister." These contracts represent but a fraction of the equipment which has been ordered,but which is not specifically related to the System. The general impression is of bewildering profusion of more or less overlappingresearch and production programmes which nevertheless offer an excellent chance of beating the air traffic control and navigationproblem into submission. As jet airliners begin to operate over the United States in in-creasing numbers, special measures are being applied to control them at heights above 24,000ft. Joint civil/ military teams atdefence radar stations are providing an advisory and vectoring service on the trans-Atlantic routes out of New York and along thetwo VOR/Vortac airways from New York to Miami. This service will be expanded as jet airliner flights are extended to new centres. As noted above, the main hope for a co-ordinated and coherentcontrol system in each ARTCC is based on the Data Processing Central now being developed by General Precision Laboratories.In tackling the task G.P.L. had to consider the thorny problem of combining control of heavy routine traffic with sudden peakswhen, for example, a complete carrier group left its ship and flew to a shore base located within the high-density area. In addition,scrambles by intercepters through the airways had to be allowed for. The Central is being designed for semi-automatic operation sothat the human controller remains as the key decision-making agent while the major part of the routine of information handlingand presentation is done for him by machines. But the human operator is also to be able to monitor the processing of informa-tion at any point in the machine routine. A detailed survey of the human factors involved, the type of information required forcontrol, layout of consoles, manpower requirements and training G.P.L. Data Processing Cen- tral Units include (top to bottom) progress strip punch and printer; Fliden flight-plan console; approach/departure console with radar and moving print- ing head; en route sector console; and flight informa- tion console with punch and printer unit at left of personnel for both the System and the simulator is beingcarried out under a $135,494 contract by Courtney and Co., of Philadelphia.The Central is based on the use of existing navigation aids and radar, but can be expanded to make use of new systems andmethods. Flight plans originating within the ARTCC or a neigh- bouring sector are inserted into the system through specialmachinery which produces flight progress strips which are both printed and punched. The pattern of punched holes allows theflight plans to be withdrawn from a store when required. A com- puter is applied to calculating whether a conflict between two ormore aircraft is likely to occur at some future time and such a conflict is positively indicated to the human controller and per-manently recorded at the appropriate console. The hand writing of progress strips or their manual transfer from one place toanother is entirely eliminated. The appropriate consoles are fitted with special moving printing heads which print progress informa-tion on racks. Radar or progress-control consoles are specially designed foreach phase of traffic control from the circuit to en route stages. When an aircraft takes off, its flight plan has already been recordedon a printed and punched strip and the information is passed to the transition console or to the appropriate route sector. Both airfieldsurface radar and precision approach radar are incorporated in the overall system. A supervisor in the Data Processing Central is provided withan overall picture of the number of aircraft headed for each airport in his sector and the number which can be expected to enter hissector in the near future. He can match this information against the acceptance rate forecast for each airport for one, two, threeand four hours in the future, so that any holding can be initiated early in a flight with the minimum delay to aircraft. Path stretch-ing is extensively employed, with a system of booked landing times and progress checking. The supervisor can also transmitdelaying instructions by keyboard to neighbouring centres when
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