Abstract
When the National Airspace System migrates from its current ground infrastructure and voice communications system to one that encompasses ground and satellite systems, digital data will be the principal communications medium. As technological advances lead to innovations in communications system development, those emerging systems will be evaluated against existing performance parameters. Baseline parameters were derived from waveform analysis performed on 8000 pilot and controller transmissions acquired from the five busiest TRACON facilities in the USA. The major findings were that communications occur quickly and with minimal silence between successive transmissions. Disruptions to efficient information transfer can result from blocked, stepped-on, and clipped transmissions — which occurred in 1.2% of the sampled transmissions. Even so, when transmissions were completely blocked an audible alarm (spoken word ‘blocked’ or heterodyning) typically alerted the controllers to their presence. Future systems developers may want to exploit and expand this capability to include stepped-on and clipped transmissions.
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