FAA/Wilcox Flight Test Results of DGPS System for Precision Approach

Victor Wullschleger, Ruben Velez, Warren Hundley, Stephen Rowson, Glen Courtney, Patty O'Donnell

Abstract:	Flight tests were conducted by Wilcox Electric, Inc., and the FAA Technical Center to evaluate the capability of local area Coarse Acquisition (C/A) code Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) to provide accuracy suitable for precision approach operations under Category I conditions. A Wilcox King Air 300 aircraft was equipped with DGPS receiving equipment and additional computing capability which deriied GPS-based instrument approach paths, converted DGPS latitude/longitude/altitude position information to lateral/vertical deviations from the approach path, and drove the appropriate aircraft flight instruments. A mobile ground station using identical DGPS receiving equipment and a very-high frequency (VHF) data transmitter was employed to send differential corrections to the airborne system. Other than the differential corrections, no other augmentation of the airborne data was employed. Analysis of data collected from 43 hand-flown approaches using ground truth provided by theodolite or laser tracker shows that the system achieved vertical accuracies meeting Category I requirements with substantial margin when narrow correlator GPS receivers were used. Lateral accuracies met Category III requirements.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993) June 21 - 23, 1993 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	111 - 118
Cite this article:	Wullschleger, Victor, Velez, Ruben, Hundley, Warren, Rowson, Stephen, Courtney, Glen, O'Donnell, Patty, "FAA/Wilcox Flight Test Results of DGPS System for Precision Approach," Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993), Cambridge, MA, June 1993, pp. 111-118.
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