Capabilities of the New ILS

Richard McFarland and David Quinet

Abstract:	The contemporary instrument landing system (ILS) has been serving the aviation community for 56 years. Over these five decades, steady improvements have been made in its capability to provide quality service, meaning principally that it will provide essentially straight beams in space to allow both manual and automatic approaches to be accomplished. The automatic approaches are needed today for landings with very low visibility, sometimes being less than 700 feet forward as viewed from the cockpit. There is another aspect relating to the ILS providing capability for safe air transportation and that is availability and continuity of service. History has shown that it is not a rough path or defective equipment that causes accidents, rather it is the absence of the facility [l]. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is now procuring a new Category II/III system, designated the Mark-20, to replace aging GRN-27 equipment. The FAA awarded Wilcox Electric Company a contract in September 199 1 to design this replacement system. During the past year, the system has successfully completed all testing and a Deployment Readiness Review (DRR) decision. In December 1994, Wilcox was given a full production go-ahead decision. On January 5,1995, the FAA commissioned the first of the Wilcox Mark-20 series at Kansas City International Airport. This same type of equipment will be installed at over 170 locations during the next 3 years. Intrinsic to this equipment are some new capabilities intended to provide for increased availability and higher quality of service for aircraft approaching and landing at major airports. This paper describes, in particular, the novel features of the Mark-20 system.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1995) June 5 - 7, 1995 Antlers Doubletree Hotel Colorado Springs, CO
Pages:	261 - 269
Cite this article:	Updated citation: Published in NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation
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