Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems Committee

Announcements

You must first log in to access prior meeting presentations, register for a meeting, or nominate some for the Ward Award.

If you do not have a login account, or cannot remember the email address associated with your account, please click on the Application Form link below.

Login

Site Search

Search our site:

Upcoming Events

Photos

Meeting Highlights New!

Subcommittee S

Prior Meetings

Abstracts may be viewed by anyone. Presentations are only available to active members who have logged in.

Meeting 132
(coming soon)

Home

Ward Memorial Award

Planning Advisory Board

Downloads

Constitution and By-Laws

About

History

Contact Us

← Return to agenda

Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 105 - Lake Tahoe - March 2010
Agenda Location	9 SUBCOMMITTEE C -- AVIONICS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION 9.3 FAA TCAS Monitoring in the US National Airspace System
Title	FAA TCAS Monitoring in the US National Airspace System
Presenter	Wes Olson
Affiliation	MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Available Downloads*	none
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Ongoing monitoring of safety critical systems is an important means of ensuring that system performance meets requirements and facilitating proactive identification and resolution of potential problems. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently implemented one such effort, the TCAS Operational Performance Assessment (TOPA) program. This program records automatic downlinks of all TCAS Resolution Advisory (RA) events within sensor coverage and correlates the RAs with surveillance data, calculates performance parameters and permanently stores the data for future analysis. Periodic and focused reports are prepared based on these data. This paper summarizes key analyses of over 15,000 TCAS RAs collected in the period April – September 2009 at 5 major terminal areas in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). Most RAs occurred below 5,000’ in Class E airspace and involved low performance General Aviation (GA) intruders. No significant issues were observed with the performance of TCAS logic; however, pilot training and the design of future systems must explicitly consider these factors.