Wind shear detection for small and improvised airfields

The goal of this project is to produce an inexpensive yet highly reliable system for detecting wind shear at small and improvised airfields. While the largest commercial airports do have wind shear detection systems and they have proven to be life savers, the overwhelming majority of places where aircraft land have no such protection. The system described here is self-organizing, redundant and highly fault tolerant. It has no single point of failure and can continue operation even after a significant number of node failures. It uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware and can quickly be deployed in rough conditions by minimally skilled personnel, providing pilots with potentially life-saving real time data. It is eminently suitable for use on improvised airfields for military and disaster response purposes. It can also be easily reprogrammed to detect wake turbulence instead of or in addition to low-level wind shear. The working prototype has only five nodes and is too small to protect a real airfield, but tests show that the architecture is scalable to over 100 nodes without modification, which is enough for an airfield of significant size. Using nothing but off the shelf components with novel software, the prototypes were ready for initial field trials in less than six months from initial concept.