A very good
news for all Indians, who prefer to travel by air, either domestic or
international. The air travel in India is going to cheaper, safer and faster in
near future.
It is all
due to the combined effort of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization),
AAI (Airports Authority of India) and Raytheon.
The project GAGAN (GPS and geo-augmented navigation), the country’s space-based
GPS augmentation system, which is going to be online from 2014.
Planned advantage:
- Flyers may be arriving at their destination 15-20 minutes ahead of schedule.
- Aircraft need not go zigzag but may go almost as the crow flies and burn less fuel and money. Airports can see less congestion, and fog may become a lesser evil.
- GAGAN will increase safety by using a three-dimensional approach operation with course guidance to the runway, which will reduce the risk of controlled flight into terrain i.e., an accident whereby an airworthy aircraft, under pilot control, inadvertently flies into terrain, an obstacle, or water.
- GAGAN will also offer high position accuracies over a wide geographical area like the Indian airspace. These positions accuracies will be simultaneously available to 80 civilian and more than 200 non-civilian airports and airfields and will facilitate an increase in the number of airports to 500 as planned. These position accuracies can be further enhanced with ground based augmentation system.
With a
Gagan-enhanced GPS device, aircraft will get far more accurate figures while
landing, take-off and in-flight, say within 10 metres of the spot compared to
the earlier figure of 70 metres.
All
aircraft flying within and into the country need to install a small patch of
sensor or receiver to get Gagan signals. New aircraft will come fitted with it,
while older ones have to be retrofitted. It may cost airlines $2,000-5,000
apiece.
The project
has nearly cost Rs.774 crore (US $141 million).
To begin
implementing a satellite-based augmentation system over the Indian airspace, Wide
Area Augmentation System (WAAS) codes for L1 frequency and L5
frequency were obtained from the United States Air Force and U.S Department
of Defense on November 2001 and March 2005.
The system will use eight reference stations located in Delhi, Guwahati, Kolkata, Ahmedabad,
Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore, Jammu and Port Blair, and a
master control center at Bangalore. US defense contractor Raytheon has
stated they will bid to build the system.
Once Gagan
gets going, India would join the U.S., Europe and Japan who have the same level
of space-based augmentation. This would enable seamless air navigation across
these regions
The ground
segment for GAGAN, which has been put up by the Raytheon, has 15 reference
stations scattered across the country. Two mission control centres, along with
associated uplink stations, have been set up at Kundalahalli in Bangalore. One
more control centre and uplink station are to come up at Delhi. As a part of the
programme, a network of 18 total electron content (TEC) monitoring stations
were installed at various locations in India to study and analyse the behaviour
of the ionosphere over the Indian region.
No comments :
Post a Comment
You need to log in to Google for giving comments here.