January 1960 Electronics World
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
Electronics World, published May 1959
- December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
Air
January 1960 Electronics World
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
Electronics World, published May 1959
- December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
Air Route Traffic
Control Centers, now using the acronym
ARTCC rather than ARTC as used in this 1960 article, were
and still are the human and computer command and control facilities responsible
for safe and orderly flow of air traffic in the U.S., and a worldwide network of
Area Control Center (ACC) handles everything else in a massive coordinated
effort. The advent of radar during World War II and the ensuing evolution of it and
electronic computers in the following years struggled to keep pace with the
equally rapidly evolving aircraft design and capability. A simple control tower
with air traffic controllers using binoculars and a radio mike could not handle
the volume of airplanes and helicopters traversing the skies and patronizing
busy terminals. Many forms of
electronic navigation aids were developed including very high frequency
omnidirectional range (VOR), direction finders (DF)
using antenna nulling for finding radials to/from FM radio transmitter, long
range navigation (LORAN),
tactical air navigation (TACAN), and others up through modern day
systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou-2). With the assistance of
computers, radar systems got smarter with signal processing able to
differentiate between weather phenomena, moving aircraft, and stationary ground
clutter. Onboard transponders in aircraft in conjunction with ground-based
equipment provided a pseudo (secondary) form of radar that used coded radio
signals to calculate distance to target rather than relying on RF signals
reflected off the aircraft structure. The info here represented a new paradigm
in air traffic control in when originally published, and is still useful today
as a snapshot of the state of the art at the time.
As an example of how terminology changes over time, most people these days
when seeing Figure 2 likely automatically think of the "cloud" as referring to
information stored on the Internet ("in the cloud").
Air Traffic Control by Electronics
By James A. Niland
Former Assistant to the Administrator, Region I, Federal Aviation Agency
With more and faster planes. the control of air traffic must be a precise task
with no margin for error. The job is being done by electronics.
Many of us have forgotten that