Concept design for a low cost cockpit display/collision avoidance system for general aviation aircraft

DCS Corporation has developed a concept for a low cost cockpit display system to provide situations awareness and collision avoidance capabilities to the general aviation (GA) community. The GA community has the desire for an autonomous air traffic management system that will notify aircraft of possible conflicts and provide resolutions for deconfliction without relying on ground stations for air traffic control. The system concept is based on each aircraft self reporting its GPS position over a Mode S data link. A CPU onboard each aircraft processes incoming position and velocity information from cooperative traffic, analyzes potential conflicts and displays the situation via a graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI provides the situations awareness to the pilot through an easily understood representation of traffic, conflicts and resolution manoeuvres. The system could be incorporated with waypoint navigation and flight planning functions to provide a complete navigation/situational awareness system at a relatively low cost. This paper presents the original system architecture and track its progression into the current architecture.