Air Services Australia has accepted the AlliedSignal Aerospace precision runway-monitor (PRM) installed at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport. Sydney is the first airport outside the USA to be equipped with the PRM, an electronically scanned, monopulse, secondary-surveillance radar which, enables simultaneous approaches to multiple parallel runways.
The PRM scans five to ten times faster than conventional surveillance radar, and updates aircraft position and velocity once a second, providing more-accurate tracking on closely spaced approaches. It provides visual and aural warnings to controllers if an aircraft deviates from the approach path.
AlliedSignal says that the PRM is the only system certificated by the US Federal Aviation Administration for parallel-runway approaches. The first of five production systems ordered by the FAA is operational at Minneapolis-St Paul Airport, and the remaining systems are to be installed at Atlanta, New York JFK, Philadelphia and St Louis.
The manufacturer is marketing the PRM worldwide to airports facing runway-capacity constraints. The company is also promoting the system's ability to monitor complex approach paths, such as might be required a noise-sensitive airports.
Source: Flight International
