Preliminary Assessment of Alternative Navigation Means for Civil Aviation

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is looking to develop alternative navigation means to global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and GPS. While the national airspace (NAS) includes many navigation systems such as distance measuring equipment (DME), VHF omni directional ranging (VOR), or non directional beacon (NDB), they are not capable to supporting the increased capabilities, capacity and efficient operations that GPS will provide. Thus it is important to examine, design and develop new alternatives capable of providing similar level of service and operational efficiencies as GPS. One idea is to develop alternatives based on existing or soon to be existing FAA systems and infrastructure. The paper details a preliminary study on using FAA infrastructure such as DME and ground based transceiver (GBT) as building blocks for a future system. The system is to be capable for providing navigation to support future needs of the NAS even in the event of GPS interference or outage.