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UK CAA statement on Electronic Conspicuity

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

Yep potentially big news. Downlink weather. But no sign of TIS-B traffic which would be excellent.

Last Edited by JasonC at 16 Aug 20:44
EGTK Oxford

I wonder what this actually means. Unless mandatory, adoption will be limited by the usual factors which limit Mode C/S adoption and usage.


Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter if people get something for fitting ADS-B then that is a substsntial improvement over the current situation and over the mode S change. Particularly if you enable lower cost transmitters as the article suggests.

That simple change of broadcasting weather over 978MHz will allow ipads etc to show weather easily with a simple dash mounted ADS-B receiver.

I think this is a positive development that we can maybe just this once not be cynical about.

Last Edited by JasonC at 16 Aug 22:22
EGTK Oxford

This wx data upload looks a UK-only thing, no?

I simply cannot believe this is going to happen since the vast majority of UK GA flies below 2000ft, with the highest density in the south, and you can get 4G data most of the time.

Also I am certain that most of the people who are currently not radiating anything useful do have Mode C/S units installed. So the invisibility is intentional, due to ignorance (poor training), a desire for “privacy”, a desire to not get done for busting CAS that doesn’t touch the ground… I simply see way too much while flying around the UK with an active TCAS system to believe otherwise. You would need to pass a law forcing ADS-B to be on all the time. That would be the real challenge here, and I don’t believe the UK will ever do that.

They could have implemented TIS over Mode S, a decade ago, to defuse the “Mode S wars”, but refused due to the cost of installing the feature in ground radars and 99% of UK GA not paying route charges.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have been suggesting for some time that it would make sense economic sense for ADS-B out to both be compulsory and 100% subsidised by NATS.

There is a carrot and a stick. The stick is that the benefit of universal carriage is primarily to CAT, the carrot is that a universal known environment would result in much less disruption caused by infringements (it would reduce, but not eliminate, infringements, but you controllers would have much better information about the position, altitude and speed of the infringer, and therefore be able to create a smaller bubble around them.)

The power and weight arguments (my hang glider has no electrical system and cannot carry another 1kg) go away with the tiny, battery powered units being developed.

The cost is becoming such that universal equipage (say 100,000 units @ £200 = £20m) is not a big price to pay for a known environment. It could be partly offset by removing the LARS system altogether.

I have put this suggestion before NATS and CAA top management several times. They have not said no.

EGKB Biggin Hill

I agree…..

Currently the UK “traffic service” is a joke, with ~ half the planes being primary or Mode A. Yet these H24 radar desks cost ~ 1M/year, fully costed.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

They could have implemented TIS over Mode S, a decade ago, to defuse the “Mode S wars”, but refused due to the cost of installing the feature in ground radars and 99% of UK GA not paying route charges.

It wasn’t just that, it was that Mode-S was extremely expensive to implement for everyone (in the time window they were looking at, any Mode-S transponders and associated installation costs would have exceeded the value of 3/4 of the glider airframes in the country, and would have been about 25% of the cost of most LAA aircraft). And as you note at that time there was zero benefit to the people who were going to have to pay to install these things – not even the carrot of reclassifying some class A airspace to allow VFR access. It was all stick, stick, stick and very expensive stick.

Things have changed, there are now much lower cost portable ADS-B units around which are not merely low cost, but avoid the huge installation cost, and there are now inexpensive devices that can display EC data.

By the way the LAA is very keen on electronic conspicuity and makes an effort to educate its members, the LAA represent a huge chunk of the “low end” GA fleet in the UK. Many of the LAA members I know are also keen on having EC.

Last Edited by alioth at 17 Aug 08:55
Andreas IOM

Mode-S was extremely expensive to implement for everyone (in the time window they were looking at, any Mode-S transponders and associated installation costs would have exceeded the value of 3/4 of the glider airframes in the country,

I paid £2k+VAT to get a KT76C replaced with a GTX330 at IAE (Cranfield), in 2005. I then sold the KT76C on US Ebay for about $1.5k (with an 8130-3, issued by IAE).

LAA aircraft… maybe the average value of an LAA type is less than certified but that would surprise me, with the average certified “spamcan” being worth about 10k-20k, and RVs (the most popular uncertified type that’s used to actually “fly somewhere”) selling for rarely less than several times that figure. I actually don’t think the market value spread is different between cert and non-cert fleets (if you clip the former to say below 100k i.e. not counting the $1M SR22s etc and above) but the non-cert community is much better at telling everybody they are poor

Hence I never bought the anti Mode S argument. Today’s 8.33 mandate is costing way more than Mode S would have cost (I reckon the average spend is 2x to 5x more – witness the avionics installer bonanza right now!) but people are too tired to fight another war. But it does seem to prove that straight money was never a genuine anti Mode S argument.

However, the CAA did an extremely incompetent PR job on it and by the time you threw in the usual UK GA community behaviour driven by a crowd of 5hr/year posters on one particular “boycott any airport over £10” site, the inevitable result was a Bolshevik Revolution against Mode S. You didn’t even need to ask who paid for the buses. The civil liberties concerns (easy aircraft tracking by tail number, possible VFR route charges; ignore the technological infeasibility etc) helped to lubricate the process nicely. Then throw in some genuine and semi-genuine arguments for aircraft without an electrical system and you are done very nicely Whereas the Americans provided the TIS carrot; in Europe only the stick is necessary

And even today, Mode S does nothing except makes it easier to track infringers because the tail number is radiated. There is absolutely zero benefit to the pilot. TCAS (both big jet and GA) uses plain old Mode C, with the extra Mode S data used in very few installations. And most of southern Europe has ignored Mode S as an airspace requirement for VFR…

By the way the LAA is very keen on electronic conspicuity and makes an effort to educate its members, the LAA represent a huge chunk of the “low end” GA fleet in the UK. Many of the LAA members I know are also keen on having EC.

That’s great but most of the invisible traffic I see is not LAA; it is standard school/club types. The uncertified types I see are largely non-TXP, and more so outside the UK where whole communities are non-TXP, often for good reasons (the 6 month foreign reg residence limit for example).

I’d like to see what the CAA does on this. That original statement seems empty of direction, because somebody has to provide the uplink and fund it somehow. After all they did talk for years about working with avionics firms to develop a low cost Mode S unit but that never happened, for a load of obvious commercial reasons.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Today’s 8.33 mandate is costing way more than Mode S would have cost (I reckon the average spend is 2x to 5x more) but people are too tired to fight another war.

Where do you get this figure from? I installed both 8.33 radio and Mode S transponder in the past 16 months and the former costed about 30% less.

Hajdúszoboszló LHHO
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