Aerospace aircraft information display system for flight operations in North Dakota

The John D. Odegard School Of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota operates flight training centers at a variety of locations, including at the Grand Forks International Airport | Mark Andrews Field (GFK). The Grand Forks operation includes a fleet of 116 aircraft and conducts approximately 120,000 flight hours per year. With students tasked to certain training exercises in certain regions of the airspace, this level of activity makes it desirable to have some way of tracking aircraft while in-flight. While a commercial system is available, it is prohibitively expensive for a university and does not provide the functionality that a custom built system can. Therefore, a system originally designed to support Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) operation and research was modified to support the flight operations at GFK and the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport (IWA). As this system has evolved, more applications have been identified for its use, including further UAS operations and research through a project called the Limited Deployment - Cooperative Airspace Project (LD-CAP); which is a UND, NASA-Langley, MITRE corporation, and Draper Laboratories cooperative automatic UAS “sense and avoid” research project. The system developed integrates aircraft position data from ADS-B along with Doppler weather radar and overlays this georeferenced information on an aviation sectional chart. In addition, the “Aerospace Aircraft Display System (AADS)” uses NATO/APA icons for the different aircraft types and displays the boundaries of the different “practice areas” and Certificate of Authorization or Waiver (COA) areas used by UND flight operations. As multiple displays are desired, the system is built on a client-server architecture; only the server is interfaced with the ADS-B transceiver. The clients retrieve all required data (ADS-B data, NOAA Doppler weather radar, and local atmospheric pressure data) independent of each other and can be configured to display those data in either a north-up orientation or an aircraft heading-up orientation. When used in more public locations the clients can be configured such that all menu options, and aircraft identifiers, are disabled. Finally, the system was developed using Linux, OpenGL, and C++, in order to be reasonably close to DO-178B compliance.