GBAS research station in braunschweig - Five years of successful GBAS operations

摘要

In December 2008 the Institute of Flight Guidance of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) installed a Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) manufactured by Thales Air Systems at the research airport Braunschweig-Wolfsburg in Germany. Since then, the Institute of Flight Guidance and other users have conducted many comprehensive experiments with this ground station throughout the GBAS research area. The ground station is part of the DLR air traffic validation center. It is not certified for official operations but is designed and developed according to all applicable specifications. In this setup, different flight inspection techniques were investigated with the station and new operational procedures were tested. Different aircraft were used for flight inspection as well as for operational procedure trials. This includes an Airbus A320 research aircraft, a King Air 350 flight inspection aircraft as well as a Boeing 737 standard airliner or a Do-128 research aircraft of the Technical University of Braunschweig. For a novel approach of verifying the contents of the GBAS message broadcast and the VHF coverage of the ground station, a helicopter (Bo-105) was used for flight tests.