A new situational awareness system that could prevent deadly ground collisions and runway incursion incidents is being offered to business aircraft manufacturers by ACSS, the Phoenix, Arizona-based avionics specialist.
ACSS, an L-3 Communications and Thales company, and better known for its traffic alert and collision avoidance (TCAS) work, is in talks with several aircraft makers over potential applications for its Surface Area Movement Management (SAMM) system. Such is the level of interest that ACSS says it could have its first corporate aircraft customer by the end of the year.
SAMM alerts crews to potential conflicts by tracking ground and airborne traffic in the terminal area using on-board surveillance systems and is part of ACSS's recently developed SafeRoute, a suite of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) software solutions. SAMM, along with a merging and spacing function, has been selected by package carrier UPS which has selected SafeRoute for a fleet-wide situational awareness upgrade program.
ACSS president Kris Ganase says business aviation manufacturers are showing increasing interest in the situational awareness benefits of SAMM, which he says represents a "giant leap over the competing [runway incursion] system, because it gives advisories."
Positions
The SAMM module uses ADS-B, traffic information service-broadcast (TIS-B) and the electronic flight bag (EFB) to display airport runways and taxiways, as well as the positions of traffic on and around the airport surfaces.
ACSS, meanwhile, expects to complete the certification paperwork for the TCAS 3000, its third generation traffic collision and avoidance system (TCAS), before the end of the year. The certification of the system, which will enter service first on Dassault's Falcon 7X, also marks the inauguration of ACSS's common computing platform (CCP), which will host the TCAS 3000 software.
"If the CCP is like a personal computer, then TCAS is like loading in Word and SafeRoute would be like Excel. It's been a three-year development program for us and the first application is the TCAS 3000," explains Ganase, who anticipates certification of the TCAS in the first quarter of 2006. Other functions that can be added to the new platform include modules for terrain awareness (TAWS), Mode S transponder and ADS-B.
Source: Flight Daily News
