Mongolia to reduce radar separation standards in September

Mongolia will reduce radar separation standards between aircraft from 90 to 30 km in September. The move follows a review of the Mongolian Civil Aviation Authority (MCAA) safety assessment requirements by New Zealand air navigation services provider Airways New Zealand.

Airways New Zealand has been helping MCAA to reduce aircraft separation distances following the installation in 2012 of radar sites across the region. Radar control has been gradually introduced, starting with a conservative 90 km separation between aircraft. Airways New Zealand has been working with MCAA to assess reducing radar separation standards to more closely align with the ICAO standard of five nautical miles (10 km). 

Tim Bradding, a former airways safety manager and current regional chief controller who has been working with MCAA, said: “Reducing aircraft separation requirements in a safe manner will allow the Mongolian CAA to more rapidly increase their air traffic flows, with economic benefits across the country and the region.”

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Radar: Your essential tool for safe flying

Radar had its birth in 1886 when Heinrich Hertz demonstrated that radio waves would reflect off of solid objects. 

As usual, war - specifically, the Second World War - spurred forward the development of Radio Detection and Ranging ('Radar' is just an acronym).  

Simply, radar works by sending a signal from a station in a certain direction. The signal will bounce back towards the station if it encounters a solid object. 

Over time we have been able to adjust the strength of our outgoing signals and the sensitivity of our receiver to enable modern day radar to tell us how solid the object is (rain, snow, ice or mountain) and in what direction the object is moving. All very helpful in weather forecasting. 

In aviation, radar is used to track aircraft movement both on ground and in the air. But, behind there’s also a radar behind the round front nose cone of most every aircraft. This helps pilots find other aircraft and, of course, avoid nasty weather and 'granite clouds.'

Great strides have been made in aviation radar in the past 20 years. Pilots can adjust the angle of their radar to inspect the height of clouds ahead and even abeam their planes. They can also look ahead up to several hundred kilometers, allowing themselves the option of avoiding developing weather altogether. 

Under development right now is Lidar. This uses lasers rather than radio waves to detect movement in molecules. 

When we can track movement on that small a scale we will then be able to see areas of turbulent air long before we fly into it.  

There are also developments aimed at making radar become predictive. In essence, it will model what a storm cloud will likely do by the time the aircraft is projected to be near it. That way, aviators can plan their storm avoidance long before they actually near threatening weather. 

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Civil Aviation Authority trials Cambridge radar

The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is using novel radar technology from Cambridge business, Aveillant.

It has awarded a contract to the company to demonstrate the ability of its Holographic RadarTM technology to provide a spectrum-efficient alternative to S-band primary air traffic surveillance radar.

The UK government aspires to release 500 MHz of public spectrum by 2020 and has tasked the CAA with investigating the viability of options to release bandwidth in the current air traffic radar spectrum allocation in the ‘S Band’ between 2.7 and 2.9 GHz.

The CAA is investigating two options: to change and reduce the spectrum occupied by existing aerodrome radars, and to exploit new, spectrum efficient solutions that have potential to provide additional benefits to aviation.

Lifting the Fog: A Brief History of Radar

One of the worst airplane disasters in history occurred as a consequence of a series of unfortunate events. The location of the disaster was the island of Tenerife, the largest and most populated island of the Canary Islands, on March 27th, 1977. Two Boeing 747 planes prepared for departure on a crowded runway where they were instructed to follow a procedure called “backtaxi” where a portion of the runway is used as a taxiway for aircraft to taxi in the opposite direction from which they will take off. Through a series of misinterpreted communications between air traffic controllers and the pilots, one of the planes began their take off before the other, backtaxiing plane had cleared the same runway. Dense fog shrouded the planes from sight and they did not realize that they were barreling towards disaster until they were 2,000 feet from each other. A detailed account of the events of this fateful day can be found here.

Computer rendering of the Tenerife disaster. Source: http://www.nycaviation.com

Of all the events that led up to the disaster, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a dense layer of fog that clouded the two planes from each others', and the air traffic controller’s, vision. Unfortunately, the small airport on Tenerife was not equipped with ground-based radar, a tool that would have allowed the controllers to see the location of the planes even with the heavy cover of fog. Although this disaster happened 35 years ago, ground-based radar technology was already available, in fact, this technology was developed long before 1977.

Radar Sunset

A slight colour to the afternoon sky at the NATS Maybury Radar Station, Plasterfield.