Improving runway safety through airborne traffic conflict detection and alerting

Abstract

In the past years there have been several attempts to reduce runway incursion accidents and incidents with the introduction of a number of aerodrome-based technologies capable of relaying runway incursion information back to the air traffic controller. These systems have proven to provide enhanced safety surveillance but fail to support situations where the time to collision is in the order of a few seconds. This paper discusses the relevance of an onboard runway incursion detection function that can provide timely alerts directly to the flight crew in an attempt to improve current safety levels. The detection system being proposed is based on a kinematic model of the movements around an airfield. The vectorial representation of each movement provides sufficient information for timely and accurate detection of runway incursion situations. Such alerts can be directly provided to the crew with the intention of providing better protection against runway conflicts, particularly in low visibility operations.