Unassisted aircraft landing via co-operative data exchange

Abstract

The air traffic controller (ATC) is required to maintain a safe and orderly flow of airplanes in any airport. A fairly recent incident at the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) caused a blackout to the entire control tower and resulted in a number of aircrafts being stranded in the air, due to the lack of communication with the ATC. This incident has caused widespread concern in the aircraft community and needs to be addressed so that future occurrences can be avoided. In Ragothaman et al., 2004, the authors demonstrated the ability of an aircraft to communicate with ground stations via Internet protocol (IP), utilizing satellite links. Several aircrafts in the vicinity of each other will utilize the same satellite link to communicate with the ground. In this work, the authors propose a system for aircrafts in the same airspace to communicate with each other, via IP, thus forming an ad-hoc network. This brings about the possibility of exchanging information between aircrafts and co-operative unassisted landing of an aircraft in worst case scenarios