Honeywell’s RDR-4000, which equips the Airbus A380, is the first weather radar system to be certificated in accordance with US Federal Aviation Administration turbulence requirements.
The system won US certification this summer, but until now “turbulence was not certificated”, says Honeywell, nor had it got technical standard order authorisation. As well as being standard on the A380, it has been selected for Singapore Airlines’ Boeing 777-300ERs.
Where conventional weather radars scan in two dimensions – direction and range – the RDR-4000 performs three-dimensional “volumetric scanning”, automatically sweeping a strip of sky from the ground to 60,000ft (18,300m), out to 590km (320nm) ahead of the aircraft, and storing the information in a database.
To remove ground clutter, it uses an internal terrain database, scaled down from Honeywell’s enhanced ground-proximity warning system. The radar automatically compensates for Earth curvature.
Source: Flight International
