Entry Date:
May 21, 2013

Preventing Mid-Air Collisions in the General Aviation Community: ADS-B enabled Traffic Situation Awareness

Principal Investigator R Hansman


Due to high nuisance alarm rates, current traffic alerting systems have limited usability in the airport environment where a majority of mid-air collisions occur. As part of NextGen, ADS-B will become the primary surveillance source in the National Airspace System. Using the higher quality surveillance information available via ADS-B, the Traffic Situation Awareness Application (TSAA) will be the next generation of traffic alerting for General Aviation. TSAA will provide timely alerts to the flight crew in order to increase their traffic situation awareness.

Under a contract from the FAA, TSAA is being developed at MIT. The development work involves the design and evaluation of a new conflict alerting algorithm, display design evaluation, human factors testing, flight testing as well as the development of the international standards governing the design of future ADS-B based traffic alerting systems by industry.