The Supersonic Aircraft and Air Traffic Control

Abstract

It its early work, the Working Group decided to study amongst other subjects the problems of bringing the S.S.T. into a traffic control system; almost certainly there will be an effect on the flight profile of the S.S.T. and on the requirements for accuracy of the navigation. In the absence of special information on the characteristics and performance of the S.S.T., a study has been made of the trends in A.T.C. handling of terminal area traffic (T.M.A.). The term terminal area has been interpreted in its broader sense, that is to say the region in which present-day transport aircraft and a fortiori supersonic aircraft are not in the cruise phase but are either descending towards the destination airport or climbing from the departure airport. With this definition, the most important terminal areas (those in countries overflown by heavy traffic and in which there is a plenitude of radio navigation aids and control), have in practice the same limitations as the flight information regions in which they find themselves.If we try to look ahead ten years to the period from 1965 to 1975, it is precisely in this period, in the countries overflown by heavy traffic, that the instruments and systems which have been recently devised and experimentally used to meet the problems of subsonic traffic control will, in fact, become operational. With these points in mind the following notes refer to the possible evolution of traffic control in the future.