Technology designed to assist airport rescue and firefighting crews at night and in bad weather has been deployed by the US Federal Aviation Administration.
The Driver's Enhanced Vision System (DEVS), developed at the FAA's research-and-development centre, combines satellite navigation, digital datalink and infra-red (IR) technologies. Using the DEVS, rescue teams can gain critical information such as aircraft condition, location of passengers and crew, presence of spilled or burning fuel, and the position of emergency equipment and personnel at a crash.
Boston's Logan International is the pilot site for a full DEVS installation since Sepember. It has five mobile rescue vehicles, two water-rescue boats, two command-and-control vehicles and one airport- security vehicle. A command centre for vehicle tracking is included the tower's emergency-management centre.
The system uses a differential global-positioning system to keep track of vehicles, a geographic-information system and a vehicle-mounted forward-looking IR sensor for locating and navigating to emergency sites. A central data and command radio link connects the vehicles with the command centre.
The FAA says that airports can use federal airport-improvement-programme grant funding to pay for up to 90% of the purchase cost of new rescue vehicles equipped with DEVS technology.
Source: Flight International
