Long gone are the days, where a navigator was tasked to determine the aircraft position using multiple sources and then bring the steering command to the pilots. Today, most aircraft have “happy boxes” that we call Flight Management System (FMS), performing the art of navigation. Transport category aircraft have a variety of inputs to these boxes, typically some inertial references, some GNSS and some ground-based sources. Generally, pilots are given the option to deselect in

Even in today’s “performance-based world” the underlying technology of Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) remains crucial, as no performance-based specification can cover the fact that we still use “steam-powered” systems, especially for communication. If you talk to somebody involved in communication engineering outside aviation, they cannot believe what technologies are being used on aircraft. The bandwidth available today for Controller-Pilot-Data-Link-Commun

When a 200-million-dollar passenger jet approaches a major airport somewhere on this planet and receives some directions from air traffic control (so-called „RADAR vectors”), they are expressed as magnetic heading [1]. This almost embarrassing fact tells us two things: In aviation, we still mostly use a magnetic north reference, despite the fact that technology would enable us to always use true north Sometimes, instructions are given as a heading, even if the goal is to achi