ADS-B Provides Air Traffic — and Pollution — Control
ITT's air traffic control system will allow planes to descend smoothly and spend less time in the air — leading to less emissions from their tailpipes.
Blue skies are going to get greener with the rollout of America's new air traffic control system featuring ITT technologies.
Today, more than 3 percent of global carbon emissions come from the tailpipes of airplanes. The aviation industry is taking steps to reduce plane-generated pollution by building lighter and more fuel-efficient aircraft and investigating alternative fuels, and the European Union is getting into the act by establishing carbon caps for airline carriers.
The next step is reducing delays that keep planes in the sky and smoothing out landing patterns so pilots can "coast" down to the runway with minimum fuel-burning, emission-spewing speed changes. That's where ADS-B and ITT come into play.
ADS-B stands for Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. It's the heart of the Federal Aviation Administration's next-generation air traffic control system and includes three components: global positioning satellites that operate with ITT technology, 800 receivers on the ground that are being built and run by ITT, and a transceiver in each plane.
Today, radars scan the skies and send their pictures to air traffic controllers every five to 10 seconds. The new ADS-B system will transmit real-time GPS satellite snapshots to both controllers and pilots. They can control aircraft spacing without taking time- and fuel-consuming precautions because they couldn't get a timely radar reading.
"A pilot can be told to follow a certain flight number into the airport, look at their in-plane ADS-B display and make the proper speed commands to maintain the optimal space interval," says John Kefaliotis, director of ITT's ADS-B program.
The goal of ADS-B is a steady flow of traffic and a controlled descent to the runway for all of the planes. Too often at today's crowded airports, planes are forced to drop down level by level — flaps up, flaps down, speed up, slow down — which leads to a very inefficient fuel burn.
United Parcel Service (UPS) has been testing a prototype ADS-B system on all its 757 and 767 aircraft for the past several years.
The results show that ADS-B is a pollution solution. UPS reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 34 percent, noise pollution by 30 percent and fuel usage by 1 million gallons a year. It also increased the number of landings per hour by 10-15 percent.
"ADS-B was designed to streamline air traffic, but when it's rolled out nationwide in 2013, it will definitely have an environmental impact," says Kefaliotis.
In April 2009, the FAA gave ITT high marks for meeting delivery and cost requirements on the roll-out of ADS-B. It was another important green light for this green program.
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