Publications
Open system protocols for aviation data link applications
October 7, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
19th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conf., Vol. 2, 7-13 October 2000.
Summary
This paper will discuss the application of "open system" communications protocols in the design and implementation of data link applications for aviation. The term "open system" in this paper refers to a set of communications protocols whose design specification is readily open to the user community, usually via publication by an international standards body. Such open system standards tend to encourage widespread implementation and enhancement of the communications protocols defined in the open standards. Ready availability of well-tested implementations helps to keep the costs of open systems low. Interoperability of equipment is enhanced by the use of open systems, as is the ease of system extensibility. In some cases, system communications infrastructures to support the open system may already be in place (e.g. the Internet). Data link applications in aviation are increasing at an accelerating rate. Whether for air traffic control, airline operations, or improved pilot situational awareness, data link systems are required for many existing and future functions in aviation. Many aviation data link designs have been proposed and demonstrated over the years. A drawback to most of these designs is their ad hoc nature. It is difficult to combine the various aviation data links into a coherent overall system architecture. Since each aviation data link was specialized for a specific task or application, there is little commonality of design, nor is there much opportunity for software/hardware reuse in ground or avionics equipment. Each aviation data link has required its own separate system infrastructure - leading to considerable overlap, complexity, and expense. At the same time, the Internet community has seen explosive growth in both the number of Internet users and the types of Internet system applications. Much of this growth may be tied to the "open system" nature of the Internet communications protocols which allows for straightforward implementation of Internet applications. It is difficult to buy a computer today that doesn't have an Internet protocol stack in its system software. Extremely inexpensive Internet implementations are in everything from microwave ovens to laptops. The Internet's dramatic growth is an indicator of the power of "open system" architecture to encourage development of communications applications. This paper will show how the use of suitable open system communications protocols can help to bring increased efficiency and lower-cost equipment to aviation data link systems.
Summary
This paper will discuss the application of "open system" communications protocols in the design and implementation of data link applications for aviation. The term "open system" in this paper refers to a set of communications protocols whose design specification is readily open to the user community, usually via publication by...
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Multilateration system development history and performance at Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport
October 7, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
19th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conf., Vol. 1, 7-13 October 2000, pp. 2.E.1-1 - 2.E.1-8.
Summary
The long search for a method to provide accurate secondary radar beacon surveillance with aircraft ID over the whole airport surface has succeeded, using the Mode S squitter and whisper shout technologies to provide signal sources on which to make multilateration position measurements. The resulting multilateration system will greatly improve the situational awareness of the ground controllers, and provide inputs to automation functions, providing improvements in airport safety and capacity.
Summary
The long search for a method to provide accurate secondary radar beacon surveillance with aircraft ID over the whole airport surface has succeeded, using the Mode S squitter and whisper shout technologies to provide signal sources on which to make multilateration position measurements. The resulting multilateration system will greatly improve...
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SOI wafer selection for CCD/SOI-CMOS technology [Abstract]
October 2, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
2000 IEEE Int. SOI Conf. Proc., 2-5 October 2000, pp. 136-137.
Summary
We have developed a process that monolithically integrates fully depleted SOI CMOS (FDSOI) with high-performance CCD image sensors. This integrated technology that enables charged-coupled devices (CCD's) to be in close proximity to, yet isolated from, FDSOI circuits. This approach exploits both the advantages of FDSOI (fast, low-power CMOS with potentially enhanced radiation performance) and those of CCD's (high quantum efftciency, low noise, and architectural flexibility). This 3.3 V, 0.3 mu m CCD/FDSOI-CMOS technology thus enables fabrication of low-power, compact imaging systems. Material requirements for CCD imagers are perhaps the most stringent of any device and require special attention to the quality of the bulk or handle wafer. We report here characterization of various SOI handle wafers for use in fabrication of bulk imaging devices.
Summary
We have developed a process that monolithically integrates fully depleted SOI CMOS (FDSOI) with high-performance CCD image sensors. This integrated technology that enables charged-coupled devices (CCD's) to be in close proximity to, yet isolated from, FDSOI circuits. This approach exploits both the advantages of FDSOI (fast, low-power CMOS with potentially...
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Learning from incidents - what the machine can learn
October 2, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
Int. Society of Air Safety Investigators Conf., ISASI, 2-6 October 2000.
Summary
Aviation weather refers to any type of weather that can affect the operation of an aircraft – anything from a brief delay in departure to a catastrophic accident during flight. Wind shear and events associated with convective weather were recognized as an aviation hazard long before Dr. Theodore Fujita began publishing his now-famous treatises. On July 28, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 from Cleveland, Ohio, USA to Nashville, Tennessee crashed after the pilot lost control of the Douglas DC3. The pilots and numerous passengers were fatally injured. The aircraft was destroyed by impact and post crash fire. The weather report at the time included warnings for storms, heavy rain, lightning and severe turbulence. The Civil Aeronautics Board found that the probable cause was a loss of control of the aircraft due to unusually severe turbulence and violent downdraft caused by a thunderstorm. In the ten-year period from 1987 through 1996, 24% of all U.S. accidents were judged to be "weather related". For the twenty-year period 1976 to 1996 fully 43% of U.S. accidents were judged to have involved wind or wind shear, and 2.3 % thunderstorm, although the two data elements are not mutually exclusive. In the U.S., approximately 82% of accidents are general aviation; the rest are air carriers and commuters of various types. When general aviation accidents are negated, and only air carriers are considered, wind and wind shear issues account for 9.5% of accidents. The Weather Systems Processor (WSP) has been developed to reduce the impact of severe weather conditions on air traffic by providing information concerning weather conditions in the airport terminal environment. WSP provides warnings to air traffic controllers and supervisors of hazardous wind shear and microburst events in the terminal area, forecasts the arrival of gust fronts, and tracks thunderstorms, providing a complete picture of current and future terminal area hazardous weather conditions that may impact runway and airport usage. Common weather situation awareness allows Terminal Approach, Tower Controllers and other traffic management personnel to jointly plan with confidence and safely manage more arrivals and departures with less delay. Knowledge of the location, severity and movement of hazardous weather allows dynamic adjustments to be made in routing aircraft to runways, approach and departure corridors, terminal arrival and departure transition areas (i.e. gate-posts) and other air routes.
Summary
Aviation weather refers to any type of weather that can affect the operation of an aircraft – anything from a brief delay in departure to a catastrophic accident during flight. Wind shear and events associated with convective weather were recognized as an aviation hazard long before Dr. Theodore Fujita began...
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Analysis and results of the 1999 DARPA off-line intrusion detection evaluation
October 2, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, RAID, 2-4 October 2000, pp. 162-182.
R&D area:
R&D group:
Summary
Eight sites participated in the second DARPA off-line intrusion detection evaluation in 1999. Three weeks of training and two weeks of test data were generated on a test bed that emulates a small government site. More than 200 instances of 58 attack types were launched against victim UNIX and Windows NT hosts. False alarm rates were low (less than 10 per day). Best detection was provided by network-based systems for old probe and old denial-of-service (DOS) attacks and by host-based systems for Solaris user-to-root (U2R) attacks. Best over-all performance would have been provided by a combined system that used both host- and network-based intrusion detection. Detection accuracy was poor for previously unseen new, stealthy, and Windows NT attacks. Ten of the 58 attack types were completely missed by all systems. Systems missed attacks because protocols and TCP services were not analyzed at all or to the depth required, because signatures for old attacks did not generalize to new attacks, and because auditing was not available on all hosts.
Summary
Eight sites participated in the second DARPA off-line intrusion detection evaluation in 1999. Three weeks of training and two weeks of test data were generated on a test bed that emulates a small government site. More than 200 instances of 58 attack types were launched against victim UNIX and Windows...
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The 1999 DARPA Off-Line Intrusion Detection Evaluation
October 1, 2000
Journal Article
Published in:
Comput. Networks, Vol. 34, No. 4, October 2000, pp. 579-595.
R&D area:
R&D group:
Summary
Eight sites participated in the second Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) off-line intrusion detection evaluation in 1999. A test bed generated live background traffic similar to that on a government site containing hundreds of users on thousands of hosts. More than 200 instances of 58 attack types were launched against victim UNIX and Windows NT hosts in three weeks of training data and two weeks of test data. False-alarm rates were low (less than 10 per day). The best detection was provided by network-based systems for old probe and old denial-of-service (DOS) attacks and by host-based systems for Solaris user-to-root (U2R) attacks. The best overall performance would have been provided by a combined system that used both host- and network-based intrusion detection. Detection accuracy was poor for previously unseen, new, stealthy and Windows NT attacks. Ten of the 58 attack types were completely missed by all systems. Systems missed attacks because signatures for old attacks did not generalize to new attacks, auditing was not available on all hosts, and protocols and TCP services were not analyzed at all or to the depth required. Promising capabilities were demonstrated by host-based systems, anomaly detection systems and a system that performs forensic analysis on file system data.
Summary
Eight sites participated in the second Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) off-line intrusion detection evaluation in 1999. A test bed generated live background traffic similar to that on a government site containing hundreds of users on thousands of hosts. More than 200 instances of 58 attack types were launched...
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Combining-efficiency X-band spatial power-combined array using a multilayered packaging architecture
October 1, 2000
Journal Article
Published in:
IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., Vol. 48, No. 10, October 2000, pp. 1769-1771.
Topic:
Summary
The design of a high combining-efficiency spatial power-combined array is described in this paper. A multilayered stacked stripline architecture enables a compact stable design. An array incorporating antenna active impedance and proper amplifier matching is measured with a combining efficiency of 87%, radiating 6.8 W of an available 7.8 W into the ideal uniformly illuminated array directivity at 10.1 GHz.
Summary
The design of a high combining-efficiency spatial power-combined array is described in this paper. A multilayered stacked stripline architecture enables a compact stable design. An array incorporating antenna active impedance and proper amplifier matching is measured with a combining efficiency of 87%, radiating 6.8 W of an available 7.8 W...
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Commercial aircraft encounters with thunderstorms in the Memphis terminal airspace
September 11, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. Ninth Conf. on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology, 11-15 September 2000, pp. 37-42.
Summary
Thunderstorms are dynamic obstacles to the flow of air traffic. Aircraft routing in the presence of thunderstorms is as dynamic as the position and intensity of the storms. The question of where pilots will and will not fly is relevant to the decisions made by human air traffic managers as well as to the development of automated decision aid tools. In order to accurately anticipate which routes will be useable one needs to be able to 1) forecast the relevant weather variables, and 2) convert those weather variables into a quantitative probability that pilots will request deviations from the nominal route. The Convective Weather Integrated Product Team at the FAA is improving the accuracy and lead time of forecasts of thunderstorm products. This paper provides an update on our examination of the issue of probability of deviation. In our recent examination of 63 hours of weather and flight track data from the DFW airspace (Rhoda and Pawlak, 1999a,b) we combined several weather variables (measurements, not forecasts) to correctly predict pilot deviation and penetration behavior for 70-85% of the encounters between thunderstorms and aircraft arriving at DW and Dallas Love (DAL) airports. We also found that pilots were more likely to penetrate strong precipitation when they: 1) were near the arrival airport, 2) were following another aircraft, 3) were flying after dark, 4) had been delayed in the air by 15+ minutes upstream of the DFW airspace. We did not find any statistically significant difference between the percentages of thunderstorm penetrations by various airlines. We also found that persistent penetration of storms near the airport is sometimes abruptly interrupted presumably by wind shear alerts from air traffic controllers or cautionary pilot reports from the penetrating aircraft. When the arrivals cease, aircraft on the final approach course may turn suddenly to the left or right to avoid the weather that caused the interruption. Aircraft that abort the approach sometimes fly through very intense precipitation-sometimes through downdrafts that are causing microburst outflows at the surface. The work described in this paper applies the methodology from the DFW study to data collected in the Memphis Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). The methodology is described briefly here and in more detail in (Rhoda and Pawlak, 1999b). We developed several probability of deviation classifiers using a portion of the Memphis data and tested them on the remaining data to determine if it is possible to predict whether pilots will penetrate or deviate around the storms. We also tested the classifiers that were developed in the DNV study on the MEM data and vice versa. We repeated the DFW hypothesis tests for various dichotomies of encounters: near/far, leading/following, light/dark, delayed/undelayed.
Summary
Thunderstorms are dynamic obstacles to the flow of air traffic. Aircraft routing in the presence of thunderstorms is as dynamic as the position and intensity of the storms. The question of where pilots will and will not fly is relevant to the decisions made by human air traffic managers as...
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A meteorological analysis of the American Airlines Flight 1420 accident
September 11, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
Ninth Conf. on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology, 11-15 September 2000, pp. 209-211.
Summary
On June 1, 1999, American Airlines flight 1420 , arriving at Little Rock, AR from Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, was involved in a fatal accident upon landing, on runway 4R at Adams Field (LIT). There were eleven casualties, including the pilot, and numerous injuries among the 145 passengers and crew on board. At the time of the accident, 0451 UTC (11:51 PM CDT), severe thunderstorms existed in the vicinity of the airport. These storms were initiated by an approaching cold front and pre-frontal trough and were developmentally aided by veering low-level wind and warm air advection, which helped to further destabilize the atmosphere. This report will focus on the meteorological conditions preceding and immediately following the accident that could have played a contributing role in the crash. However, no theories on the actual cause will be put forth.
Summary
On June 1, 1999, American Airlines flight 1420 , arriving at Little Rock, AR from Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, was involved in a fatal accident upon landing, on runway 4R at Adams Field (LIT). There were eleven casualties, including the pilot, and numerous injuries among the 145 passengers and crew on...
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A study of time-to-fly estimates for RUC and ITWS winds
September 11, 2000
Conference Paper
Published in:
Proc. Ninth Conf. on Aviation Range and Aerospace Meteorology, 11-15 September 2000, pp. 113-117.
Summary
Automated air traffic decision support tools must compute the time it takes an aircraft to fly along a path. The estimation of Time-To-Fly (TTF) requires accurate knowledge of the wind. Two proposed sources of wind data for the Center-TRACON Automation System (CTAS) developed by NASA are the Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) and the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS). The RUC is a mesoscale numerical weather prediction model run by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The ITWS was developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory for the FAA. The ITWS winds product, Terminal Winds takes in RUC forecasts and refines them using recent local measurements of the wind from Doppler radars, aircraft, and ground stations. This report examines the question: does the use of RUC and ITWS wind fields lead to different Time-To-Fly estimates?
Summary
Automated air traffic decision support tools must compute the time it takes an aircraft to fly along a path. The estimation of Time-To-Fly (TTF) requires accurate knowledge of the wind. Two proposed sources of wind data for the Center-TRACON Automation System (CTAS) developed by NASA are the Rapid Update Cycle...
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