Cybersecurity and Phased Arrays - PP848 and PP792

The Ku/Ka satcom subcommittee met the last two weeks to progress the latest AEEC standards and characterstics defining secure broadband connections and satcom equipment.  Airbus expects to use PP848 for securing non-safety communications, bringing an unexpected urgency to completion of IPSec end-end functional definitions. PP848 will offer an optional means to segregate both passenger and non-safety aeronautical communications with a commercial broadband radio, such as Ku/Ka satcom.  PP792 builds upon ARINC 791 to characterize emerging flat-panel antennas, especially phased array antennas, as well supplier-specific guidance for installing antenna systems using either 791 or PP792.

Aviation Data Link - Security, Segmentation, QoS

Beginning in 1978, aircraft data link emerged using a VHF network named ACARS (Aircraft Communication, Addressing and Reporting System).  ACARS is a purpose-built, store-and-forward, character-based, messaging service.  Within just over ten years, ACARS was extended to Inmarsat L-band satcom and HF radio.  Five years later (1995) ACARS was delivering Air Traffic clearances. Today Iridium SBD (short-burst data) and even cellular radios communicate ACARS messages. How is the industry migrating to embrace and secure IP networks, and will ACARS ever go away? How are broadband radios being applied to support airplane health monitoring or EFB?

Air Safety Investigation

The first and foremost response to any incident is rapid rescue and for sympathy to victims, survivors, and those that loved them.

Timely alerting and accurate aircraft position is the key to rapid response.

Moving beyond rescue becomes recovery.  At this point the motivation is to collect the remains of those lost and as much of the airplane itself.  Assembly of the airplane parts into a skeleton gives a foundation to check and verify various failure scenarios.

Regardless of the cause of catastrophe, airplane structure and systems are designed to be fault tolerant.  Crash survivability is a paramount endeavor.  Materials are evaluated for their contributions to post-crash fire and smoke.  While the first objective is to understand what led to the catastrophe, just as important is to understand what can be improved to enhance prevention and survivability.

Double Secret Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Airborne Equipment

RTCA produces DO-160, Environmental Conditions and Test Procedures for Airborne Equipment

RTCA DO-160G Sections

OneWeb: Key Characteristics and Aero Application

The public has its first good glance into what is OneWeb

Aero Antennas: Bigger is Better!

ThinKom and QEST are both promoting Ka-band flat panel antennas that use about a 25" aperture for receive.  ARINC 791 provisions can support at least a 30" aperture, as shown by Gogo with 2Ku.  Should a Ka antenna be built as big as possible, or is there any size that is "big enough"?

As time moves forward, will service levels going up (due to evolving user behaviors) outrace the cost of services going down (due to expanding capacity and lower costs to launch capacity)?

How valuable will a larger antenna be if trends run away from expectations?

It Takes a Village

Delivering a consistent Internet experience to an airline passenger demands adequate provisioning for the peak periods (highest contention ratios).  It may take many satellites with overlapping coverage to aggregate sufficient capacity to meet the demands in any "hotpot".

Show Me the Gbps: When 1 + 1 > 2

Some airlines offer passengers connectivity for free, others make the passengers pay, and in the end most will offer a mix of free and pay services.  Will the airplane radio be able to meet the needs of the passenger?  What about the radio network?  How will that evolve over the next ten years?  This feasibility analysis takes a look at the US market to reveal the technical requirements for a satellite network to meet the demand from a "typical" large US airline and from four such large US airlines.

Both Ku-band satellites and Ka-band satellites can serve any foreseeable airline passenger connectivity market.  Because of concentrated demand, a single large US airline under the heaviest demand cannot be served from a single orbital slot by 2026.  It takes a family of orbital slots with satellites offering overlapping coverage to aggregate the spectrum needed at the busiest airports.  A family of satellites offers a robust and scalable solution to grow as demand grows, applying the newest technology incrementally along the way.

Average Data Rate and Usage - Use Cases

Every Internet access session is a unique experience generating a unique amount of usage (as measured broadly in MBytes). Light, average, heavy and future make up four categories. For each usage scenario, there are three use cases: all streaming, all Internet access, or split evenly between the two. The session duration and the amount of time off-line is another dimension. A short session will have less off-line time than a longer session.

My Take on "Take-Rate"

Satellite 2016 - Day 1

Software defined payloads, beam-forming arrays, and unfurling antennas are just a few of the technologies to power the digital satellite revolution.  The challenge is to reach a price point that is competitive with terrestrial alternatives and with enough capacity to serve the addressable markets.

Reflecting on the Boeing 727

http://www.boeingimages.com/ Boeing 727

The first flight of the Boeing 727 began with a center-engine surge after takeoff.  It settled down quickly.  In any case, the tail-mounted configuration made engine-out handling much easier than wing-mounted engines. The outer leading-edge slats got stuck deployed (symmetric) as the aero loads overwhelmed the actuator.  It was going to take more than a few hiccups to keep Lew Wallick and his crew from two plus hours inflight, including landing configuration stalls, using flaps 40, using less than 2000 feet of ground roll in the first landing - and a big thumbs-up!  The first flight was on Feb. 9, 1963, fifty three years ago. I was almost five years old, living about 150 miles north in Vancouver and completely oblivious.  Yet my own personal first flight would be on a 727 just six years later.

Cisco Forecast: One mobile device needs 150 kbps today, 500 kbps in 2020

Beam Hopping, Beam Forming, Frequency Reuse, and the Quest for Maximizing Satellite Throughput

Satellite communication is amazing in so many ways.

Start with launching a machine into space and expect it to operate precisely while managing to harvest solar energy and hold attitude and position.

Add to the mix operating at frequencies that frankly are absurd.

Wide-band transponders got us this far, but their utility now is just a gateway to the future of spot beams.

Spot beams are formed by higher gain antennas with smaller beam widths than continental wide beam transponders.  The beam width is a function of aperture and of frequency.  A given aperture delivers a smaller beam width with higher frequency.  A given frequency delivers a smaller beam width with a bigger aperture.

The last piece of the puzzle is the part that is in play, that of how to switch the information between the beams, and how many beams can you use?

A Broadband User Average Throughput is 150 kbps, not 25 Mbps

The following are all clipped excerpts driving the point that a good broadband experience averages only 150 kbps...the contended data rate...not the headline "advertised rate of 25 Mbps.

Fixed Wireless and Satellite Review - NBN - Final Report May 2014

50-80 Peak Busy Users Contend for the Advertised Rate (Revised)

Secure Networking, Safety Comms, Future of Satellite Voice

VICTS (2Ku) is Mechanically Steered & Other Antenna Characteristics

Broadband Communications for Business Aviation - NBAA 2015

NBAA attendees with an interest in how to connect their airplanes to the Internet and choosing to rest their dogs on the second day in Las Vegas at the NBAA Exhibition, were serenaded by a parade of service providers from 800 MHz to 30 GHz and even to the unknown.

A Stroll through APEX 2015

Wireless connectivity with passengers was the mainstream theme at the 2015 APEX exhibition in Portland, Oregon. If not connectivity to passengers, it’s connectivity to airplane systems. If not the technology, then content or monetization.

Skeletal remains of a payphone - lost too is the directory

Airplane Mode 2015

Twitter - Will Ferrell

UPDATE 24 Sep - Here is the current issue list:

* Should (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS) stay on when engaging Airplane Mode?

* How can a mobile client application become aware of Airplane Mode?

* How can the network command "mute/pause" during Passenger Address?

* How should a laptop operating system accommodate an Airplane Mode?

* Should the user have control settings to manage/monitor how each network is utilized?

* How should Airplane Mode recommendations be developed and approved?

* Should the local access point have a protocol to convey maximum streaming rate, relative cost, and network quality of service level?

* Should a special "Cellular Airplane Mode" used with picocells provide overarching EIRP limits or any other useful information?

Average Page Load should be less than Five seconds

Connected Airplane - How did we get here, what's next, and what are the big challenges?

The Connected Airplane

Net Neutrality: The end of Inflight Internet, or business as usual?

How will emerging inflight broadband comply with Net Neutrality?

Are spot beams better than wide beams for aviation?

Are spot beams better?

Skew Angle and Effective Aperture of an Airborne Antenna

Skew angle is a difficult concept to grasp, but the effect can be profound.

Low-profile antennas installed on the top of an airplane fuselage introduce special challenges.

Second generation antennas just entering the market sit flat, creating a change in gain and beamwidth as a function of the relative elevation of the target satellite.

Skew angle rotates the beam-pattern as shown above for various antenna types, at both zero and 90 degree skew.

Amazon Prime Air: If you can't beat them?

photo credit: Amazon

How can a UAV safely delivery packages?

Are the FAA UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) (or drone) rules taking too long and are they too restrictive?

It is not possible for an operator (remotely) to overcome all the risks of a UAV when overflying a community...

...since the failure we are concerned with most is loss of control.

Ka-band Airborne Antenna Figure of Merit (G/T)

Estimated Receive Performance

Circular and Square 24"x24" ESA

30"x6" rectangular horn array

Data Link Available

Ken Simmons, Ed Porisch, Peter Lemme,
Mary Nakasone (Sato), Dave Allen
QANTAS 747-400 FANS Certification Flight Test
June 19, 1995

Ku-band Airborne Antenna Figure of Merit (G/T)

Estimated Receive Performance

Circular and Square 30"x30" ESA

34"x7" rectangular horn array

Postcards from Apollo 15

Rain Fade

Apollo 1 (Apollo 204) - January 27, 1967

I happened to tour Launch Complex 34 a few days ago, today being the 48th anniversary of the catastrophe. 

While only 8 years old when the fire happened, it was devastating to me and remains a sorrow-full moment. 

Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived

Ku-band Return Channel Maximum PSD

Summary for Fixed 30x30 Rectangular and Circular plus Gimbaled 34x7

Ka-band Return Channel Maximum PSD

Summary for Fixed 24"x24" Square and Circular ESA plus Gimbaled 30x6 Horn Array

Return Channel Link Budget

CPDLC - Connecting 40% of the pilots to 70% of the controllers

I read this article from Woodrow Bellamy, Avionics Magazine, updating status of CPDLC programs and professing voice congestion was a growing concern and required benefit from CPDLC

(controller - pilot data link communication)

Advancing CPDLC

Forward Channel Downlink Regulations

Forward Channel Considerations

Transponder Downlink dBW Contours

Link Budget Background, Definitions, and Assumptions

When "Black and White" is better than a Rainbow

Flying home from a committee meeting where we discussed miswiring,
I look up and find that the no-smoking and seat-belt wiring are reversed only on the indicators over my seat!

Miswiring, typically when two connectors are mistakenly swapped, can become a hazard to the airplane and airplane systems.

In-Flight Telemetry

Is it technically feasible for a flight data acquisition unit parametric feed, normally directed to the crash-survivable digital flight data recorder, to be also transmitted in real time?

I hate it when my free Internet doesn't work?

Are people more frustrated and vocal with the experience they pay for?

ACARS needs to embrace modern data links using IP

If only ACARS could look beyond VHF and L-Band

The popularity of a product is somewhat related to its price, where free is in its own universe

Norwegian Air, which gives away Internet access that cannot fulfill but a few with unlimited desires, much less everyone's, is in fact a wildly popular part of their award-winning passenger experience.

FANS-1 ACARS and Satcom must pass Airplane Equipment Interoperability Test (AEIT) (1995)

Boeing sold production and retrofit commitments to install and certify FANS-1 functionality without regard to specific ACARS and SATCOM part numbers.  All existing ACARS, and many SATCOM systems, do not support the Airplane Equipment Interoperability Test (AEIT) requirements.

Until their ACARS and SATCOM are approved, customers who purchased the FANS-1 changes will not be able to activate the air traffic services (ATS) function, which is not what they are expecting.

Airplane Personality Module

I presented opposition to the Airplane Personality Module, for reasons stated in this paper.

Airplane Personality Module (1996)

The decision was made to proceed, and ARINC 607 supplement was published in Aug 1998.

TRANSITIONAL USE OF ARINC SPECIFICATION 622 (1994)

COMMENTS ON DRAFT REPORT ON ATNP/1 AGENDA ITEM 2:

"COMMUNICATION ASPECTS OF INTERFACING APPLICATIONS TO THE ATN (E.G...TRANSITIONAL USE OF ARINC SPECIFICATION 622",
14 JUNE 1994.

Inmarsat Satellite Communications (1994)

Four years after the first satcom on 747-400,  here is a snapshot of the technology, the interfaces, and the applications.