Radar Estimation of the Height of a Cruising Aircraft

Abstract

Separation standards are used for assuring the safe and effective operation of aircraft in a traffic control environment and as aircraft operations increase in number the need to reconsider separation standards is strongly voiced both by operators and controllers. A panel, the Review of the General Concept of Separation Panel (RGCSP), has been organized by ICAO and the possibility of reducing conventional separation standards has been discussed. Mathematical models for estimating collision risk due to loss of separation between aircraft require data on navigation accuracy. In general, three-dimensional radars are used for height finding but these are complicated and expensive.The altitude of the cruising aircraft is required within about 100 ft. In the simplified radar here described a rotating antenna produces a fan beam for scanning aircraft flying overhead. The data obtained from several scans are processed by a mini-computer and the height of the aircraft estimated by a least-square method and sequential approximation. Between the items of information obtained for each scan (the distance, the elevation angle and the data acquisition time) a theoretical relationship is established as an observation equation, one of the coefficients of which includes the height information. The coefficient is determined by a curve-fitting method. The paper first describes the method of analysis for height estimation and then an evaluation of the accuracy of the method by a computer simulation.