Flight Testing the GAST D Solution at DLR's GBAS Test Bed

Michael Felux, Thomas Dautermann, Boubeker Belabbas

Abstract:	In 2011 we performed a series of flight trials for evalua-tion of the CAT-III GBAS system and testing its capabili-ties in an operational environment. In the first campaign we flew a total of 17 approaches on two days at the end of August 2011 and two days at the beginning of November with DLR’s VFW-614 research aircraft. In December we continued the trials with our Airbus 320 as a representa-tive commercial aircraft for today’s air traffic. To evaluate performance of the GBAS based navigation we post processed a dual frequency carrier phase trajecto-ry in a combined forward and backward solution as a truth reference. We will present the relevant parameters from all flights, putting special emphasis on the GAST D spe-cific aspects. These mainly include the outputs of the ionospheric monitoring schemes and geometry screening aspects. As the flights were performed on days without ionospheric disturbances we had no detections of moni-tors throughout the flight. At all times the performance was well within all limits and vertical accuracy typically better than 1m. Furthermore, we compared the calculated deviations to the measured ILS deviations during the flight and saw significantly less noise on the GBAS guid-ance signals.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012) September 17 - 21, 2012 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	2116 - 2122
Cite this article:	Felux, Michael, Dautermann, Thomas, Belabbas, Boubeker, "Flight Testing the GAST D Solution at DLR's GBAS Test Bed," Proceedings of the 25th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2012), Nashville, TN, September 2012, pp. 2116-2122.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In