Required Surveillance Performance Accuracy to Support 3-mile and 5-mile Separation in the National Airspace System

This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. Surveillance in today's National Airspace System (NAS) is provided by a system of terminal and en route radars. The separation distance that an air traffi c controller is required to maintain between aircraft depends, in part, on the performance of these radars. The accuracy of these radar systems depends on the range of the aircraft from the radar and whether the aircraft being separated are tracked by the same or different radars. For this reason the separation standards are expressed in terms of range from the radar and also depend on whether or not the two aircraft being separated are tracked by the same or different radars. As new technologies for surveillance are introduced, it is worthwhile to express the requirements for surveillance systems in terms of a technology-independent Required Surveillance Performance (RSP) for the types of separation service being provided, i.e., 3-mile separation or 5-mile separation. This report presents an analysis and fl ight test validation to derive the RSP accuracy needed to support 3-mile and 5-mile separation. The approach taken in this analysis is to examine the error characteristics of the various types of surveillance sensors in the FAA inventory and to analyze their performance with regard to providing accurate separation measurements to controllers. The report is organized to fi rst give a background describing the current surveillance systems and separation standards and their evolution. Next the concept of RSP is introduced. This is followed by a section describing the analysis that was used to derive the RSP attributes presented in this paper followed by a description and results of a fl ight test performed to validate this analysis. The Federal Aviation Administration is modernizing the Air Traffic Control system to improve flight efficiency, to increase capacity, to reduce flight delays, and to control operating costs as the demand for air travel continues to grow. Promising new surveillance technologies such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, (ADS-B), multisensor track fusion, and multifunction phased array radar offer the potential for increased efficiency in the National Airspace System (NAS). However, the introduction of these surveillance systems into the NAS is hampered because the FAA Order containing the surveillance requirements to support separation services assumes surveillance is provided by radar technology. …