A digital airborne situational awareness
system and method. The
system is installed on multiple aircraft to generate an airborne network providing collision avoidance without ground control. A
global positioning system (GPS)
receiver unit is coupled to a
microprocessor in each aircraft equipped with the
system. A
software engine receives the raw
GPS data and determines location, speed, flight path direction, and altitude. The
software engine conditions the
GPS data for display on a
cockpit display panel. The conditioned data orients the display with the heading, speed, and altitude data of the host system aircraft. A
transceiver section provides
data transmission to other airborne receiving units within the approximately forty
mile range of the airborne network. The
transceiver transmits data packets including reconditioned location (track), altitude, and an aircraft class identifier to other aircraft in the network. The
transceiver receives data from other airborne vehicles equipped with the system within the network range. Once the computations of positional data for other aircraft are performed, the positional data is sent to the
display processing section for appropriate
cockpit display. The
software engine develops a set of projections that are compared to the relative speed, flight path direction and altitude of the all other units in the airborne network. These projections determine the
threat levels of converging flight paths with limits that provide warning data to the
pilot of any pending flight path conflict situation.