Testing a Collision Avoidance Display with High-Precision Navigation

Recent years have seen a rise in sophisticated navigational positioning techniques. Starting from classical GPS, differential GPS, ground-based augmentation, and raw data submission have opened possibilities for high precision lateral positioning for beyond what was thinkable before. This yields new perspectives for technologies like ACAS/TCAS, by enabling last-minute lateral avoidance as a supplement to the established vertical avoidance maneuvers. Working together with Ohio University's Avionics Department, DLR has developed and tested a set of displays for situational awareness and lateral last-minute avoidance in a collision situation, implementing some state-of-the art ideas in collision avoidance. The displays include the possibility to foresee the hazard zone of a possible intruder and thus avoid that zone early. The displays were integrated into Ohio University's experimental airplane, and a flight experiment was conducted to make a first evaluation of the applicability. The tests were carried out in fall 2012. We will present the principal architecture of the displays and detail the implementation into the flight carrier. Furthermore, we will give first results of the displays' performance.