Ohio University/FAA Flight Test Demonstration of Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS)

Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) flight tests were conducted at the William J. Hughes Technical Center using a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-operated Boeing 727 aircraft in August 1997. This demonstration represents the first full-scale testing of the proposed LAAS architecture and showed the feasibility of key components of the FAA/RTCA LAAS design, including the multipath-limiting antenna system, the integrity monitoring function, and the use of the Very High Frequency Data Broadcast (VDB). The LAAS ground facility, as implemented for the tests, consists of three multipath-mitigating antenna systems, six narrow-correlator GPS C/A-code receivers, a VDB transmitter, and supporting processors. In the aircraft, the VDB-transmitted differential corrections are combined with GPS data from two narrow-correlator C/A-code receivers to produce a redundant aircraft position. The aircraft position is derived from carrier-smoothed code measurements.