Aircraft landing using GPS

The advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is revolutionizing the field of navigation. Commercial aviation has been particularly influenced by this worldwide navigation system. From ground vehicle guidance to aircraft landing applications, GPS has the potential to impact many areas of aviation. GPS is already being used for non-precision approach guidance; current research focuses on its application to more critical regimes of flight. To this end, the following contributions were made: (1) Development of algorithms and a flexible software architecture capable of providing real-time position solutions accurate to the centimeter level with high integrity. This architecture was used to demonstrate 110 automatic landings of a Boeing 737. (2) Assessment of the navigation performance provided by two GPS-based landing systems developed at Stanford, the Integrity Beacon Landing System, and the Wide Area Augmentation System. (3) Preliminary evaluation of proposed enhancements to traditional techniques for GPS positioning, specifically, dual antenna positioning and pseudolite augmentation. (4) Introduction of a new concept for positioning using airport pseudolites.;The results of this research are promising, showing that GPS-based systems can potentially meet even the stringent requirements of a Category III (zero visibility) landing system. Although technical and logistical hurdles still exist, it is likely that GPS will soon provide aircraft guidance in all phases of flight, including automatic landing, roll-out, and taxi.