International Symposium

Precision Approach and Automatic Landing

(Munich, Germany, July, 2000)

Matteo Zanzi

DEIS, University of Bologna

viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna - ITALY

International Symposium on Precision Approach and Automatic Landing (ISPA’2000) took at place at Munich, on July 18-20, 2000. This second International Symposium was organized by the German Institute of Navigation (DGON) under Patronage of Dr.H.E.Reinhard Klimmt (Minister of Transport, Building and Housing, Germany). Opening Remarks, Welcome Address give the introduction, brief review, showing great importance of this venue for successful evolution in Aviation and Aerospace Engineering.

This Symposium provides up-to-date overview of precision approach and landing system developments. So, some results: ISPA 2000 Symposium The theme of the symposium has been the precision approach and automatic landing. This field has polarized recently new interest by the world of aerospace technology because of two main causes:

1. the increased demand of air services, that has lead to very busy airways and has consequently increased the risk of incidents

2. the aviation applications of satellite navigation (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS) that has represented a big revolution for air-navigation, at first for en route phases of flight; now, terminal area operations are afforded with the use of special augmentations such as LAAS, WAAS and integration with other sensors.

The presentations invited at the symposium have made a state of the art of new and traditional technologies. It has emerged that traditional systems such the ILS are not going to be phased down yet, at least in the next 5 years. This because for CAT III landings they still represent the best solution in terms of reliability and safety, even if they are expensive to manage. Microwave Landing Systems (MLS) has not a large diffusion in many airports because of their high cost, even if the service volume covered by a MLS system is bigger than for an ILS. The majority of the invited presentations at the symposium indicated that the most innovative and promising systems for precision approach in the next future are the satellite systems combined with ground (LAAS), airborne (DGPS-INS integrations) or space (WAAS, EGNOS, Galileo) augmentation systems.

Moreover, it has been shown that for CAT I approaches probably also space augmentation systems will fulfill the needed requirements; nevertheless, only ground together with airborne augmentation systems are likely to provide good results in terms of Required Navigation Performance (RNP) for CAT II and III approach and landing.

The conclusion is single: this Symposium provided a Forum to the Scientists and Engineers, working in the theoretical and applied aspects of navigation systems area, to exchange their researches and findings with fellow researchers.