Good old NASA... a political pork and public realtions machine with some science attached, some of it good and some of it doing masters thesiss over and over and over.
the technology exists to do what was recommended It will just cost a few $100K per aircraft and the surveys and mapping, I hate to tell you, are not sufficiently accurate or standardized to do this. Anyone have a spare few $10s of millions to devote to this? (.....silence,....crickets chirp.......)
Thought Not.
Okay. there are other ways around this with infrared that has been kicking around for years....that's what FLIR is on military aircraft to attack at night and in bad wx. Anyone have $250K per aircraft and some standards and procedures to use? Thought not.
Radar has been showing returns from stuff you didn't want to look at since Watson-Watt and before. Signal processing can get rid of a lot of it and in ATC primary returns are correlated with beacon returns. Problem here is with the target data update rate. It is too slow for modern airliners on the airport surface, on approach and takeoff/departure. thats where multilateration systems are coming in. Yes, military fire control radars have quicker update rates and you can tie them into the ultimate midair collision remediation capability...an AA missile...then you only lose one aircraft.
[ 01 November 2001: Message edited by: RATBOY ]