Use of Satellite Navigation for General Aviation (GA) and Aerial Work (AW)

摘要

Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to be able to add some thoughts from the perspective of General Aviation and Aerial Work to this conference's themes. First of all let me introduce myself. My name is Dieter Pade and I'm the Managing Director of AOPA-Germany. More importantly maybe, all my life navigational interest were part of my jobs: 1. as a merchant Navy master on civilian ships up to passenger boats with 40.000 tonnes; 2. as a fast patrol boat commander; 3. as a fighter pilot becoming aquatinted with Inertial Navigation; 4. as a Commercial pilot getting to know Sat. Nav. Possibilities. You can imagine with this background that my perception of navigation is very traditional on one side, but future oriented on the other side. Already early in my life I learned that changes in navigational systems never meant, one system might not be good enough for all purposes and conditions anymore. It is always good - on sea as in the air - to have a second choice as a supplement or as a backup. Changes always have to come in little steps prior considering all risks incorporated in new systems. However at certain times you must put all your investments in one hat, as the UK did in 2. WW when it developed the Radar system. Today in Aviation we are faced with such dramatic capacity shortfalls, that we face and emergency situation. LORAN-C to me is known already since 1961, when we run Ariels over the Atlantic with the north German Lloyd ship TS Bremen. In Aviation, we are faced with a complicated situation. The needs of the Airline industry dominate and the needs of General Aviation (GA) and Aerial Work (AW) are underestimated. INS - FMS - glass cockpits are some of the technologies, today GA/AW can't afford. We could however implement GPS and LORAN-C systems with reasonable costs and share the European airspace while providing the required navigational performance the ECAC navigation strategy requires. In other words, the states narrow their vision of future navigation requirements to those of airline type equipment and they tend to overlook other user's needs, as we can prove with the implementation of RVSM and the 8.33 kHz radio on 7. October 1999.