The Boeing/Industry GPS Landing System Flight Test Experiments

Tim Murphy, Dean Miller, Dan Heine, Charles Howell, Alex Both, Mark Wright, Clint Pierce, Jim Semler

Abstract:	Boeing is leading an industry team composed of NASA and four avionics manufacturers in a joint program to address the development of requirements for Satellite Navigation Precision Approach Systems. This program focuses on tbe development of requirements through analysis and simulation of various candidate architectures for the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Landing System (GLS). As an important step in the validation of analysis and simulation capability under development, the team conducted an extensive flight test program to collect real-world data relevant to various error sources inherent to a GLS system. The data collected during the flight test will be used to validate the models used in on-going simulation studies. This paper describes the flight test program and provides an overview of the on-going program the flight test data supports. The Boeing/industry team flight test was the first true multi-channel GLS flight test program. Previous CAT III GLS demonstration programs have utilized a single string of GLS equipment, sometimes connected in parallel to multiple channels of a production autopilot. This flight test included dual strings of equipment which independently exercised 2 channels of a production 757 autopilot. This test program was also unique in the sheer volume of data collected. There were four vendor systems on board the airplane as well as two GPS based flight reference systems for a total of 10 GPS receivers. There were four independent differential datalinks supporting 4 different GLS systems with varying architectures. A total of 267 GLS approaches were flown at two different airports over the course of 15 days of flight testing. More than 1000 approaches worth of data were collected. This paper focuses primarily on describing the flight test program. The data acquired is described and some preliminary results are presented.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1996 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 22 - 24, 1996 Loews Santa Monica Hotel Santa Monica, CA
Pages:	155 - 166
Cite this article:	Murphy, Tim, Miller, Dean, Heine, Dan, Howell, Charles, Both, Alex, Wright, Mark, Pierce, Clint, Semler, Jim, "The Boeing/Industry GPS Landing System Flight Test Experiments," Proceedings of the 1996 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Santa Monica, CA, January 1996, pp. 155-166.
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