Situational and Terrain Awareness and Warning System Implementation on Android Smartphone for Manned Aviation Applications

Abstract

General aviation (GA) aircraft are for the most part not equipped with situational awareness or alerting systems, namely in terms of traffic or terrain collision. This is largely due to lack of regulatory requirements, but also because such systems tend to be costly. By over an order of magnitude, these types of aircraft are the most common in the world's airspace. Their prevalence, combined with their more terrain-proximal flight profiles, make GA aircraft most susceptible to controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) incidents. We introduce an economical situational awareness and alerting system in an attempt to mitigate CFIT accidents in otherwise uninstrumented GA aircraft. We do so using a common smartphone to run an application which interfaces with NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital terrain elevation database (DTED).