Performance evaluation of passive secondary surveillance radar for small aircraft surveillance

Situational awareness is an essential factor for flight safety and efficiency. The current Air Traffic Management (ATM) uses various radio equipment. Today, many aircraft have a capability called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast). They determine a position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcast their flight information. ADS-B equipment have a high cost of installation, maintenance and operation. For this reason, in Japan, the ADS-B system is installed in a small number of aircraft for general aviation and small aircraft such as motor gliders. However, there were requests for a simple surveillance system without special equipment such as ADS-B for aircraft operation. In this paper, we described the performance evaluation of PSSR (Passive Secondary Surveillance Radar) system by flight experiments using motor gliders. And we discussed the potentials of the PSSR.