TIM RIPLEY
Airlines could be protected from devastating Concorde-type accidents by a new radar warning system being developed by British scientists. The research team from the Malvern, UK-based radar department of the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has already tested an experimental system that can find small objects on runways that could be ingested into aircraft engines with catastrophic results. The millimetric wave radar based systems, as well as improving flight safety, would save the airline industry significant sums by reducing the number of aborted take-offs and landings. It would also be able to find potentially lethal objects in bad weather or at night when visual searches of runways are more difficult or impossible. Tim Floyd, the department's business development manager, says every major airport should have one of these systems. "They've got big high risk aircraft and big reputations to protect," he says.
"We have started to get approaches from airports and airlines to support their anti-liability activity. "We have outline intent from nine countries without even approaching them - especially for airports where there is not so much security from incursion by people and animals." While runway debris is not a new problem, the issue came to the fore when Concorde crashed. The FAA says its top problem is runway incursions, forcing aircraft to abort. In the USA last year there were 200 runway incursions. "We did trial four months ago on the runway of one of our own airfields," says Floyd. "In the tests it saw items objects the size of clenched fist at 300m (1,000ft). Two or three systems could cover all of Heathrow airport's runways.
"The next tests will be on operational runways using real pieces of aircraft, such as inspection panels or screwdrivers that are sometimes left in wheel bays or on aircraft surfaces. Our system sees objects and changes. It would trigger an alert when it detects something that was not there before. "We have been doing trials for 12 months. We are not an equipment manufacturer. We have spoken to a number of companies who make radars for airports. At the moment we are still assembling requirement information from different customers.
"We looked at taking existing technology and put into the commercial market," he says. The ability to do this is the result of 20 years of research into millimetre wave radar processing research at Malvern. That is the key to extracting a target from background clutter. Millimetric wave radar can say how big an object is or if it is moving on a runway.
Source: Flight Daily News
