Centre county Pennsylvania, USA | WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) and LAAS (Local Area Augmentation System) are being developed by the US Federal Aviation agency (FAA) for aircraft guidance. FAA envisioned WAAS as an aircraft route guidance system and LAAS as an aircraft landing guidance system. Both use Differential GPS (DGPS) for position awareness. WAAS uses satellite transmitted differential corrections and LAAS uses local (airport) transmitted differential corrections. At the time both systems were being “engineered”, FAA engineers believed both WAAS and LAAS would be needed to provide position accuracy required for safe end-to-end air route and landing guidance.
Private companies are now providing satellite transmitted differential corrections to agriculture DGPS users that have position accuracy specified as being several inches. Both John Deere’s SF2 and Omni-Star’s HP are satellite transmitted differential correction services that provide that level of position performance.
It seems to me that private companies have now demonstrated that WAAS like systems are capable of meeting guidance requirements for both aircraft route and landing. Will a WAAS performance upgrade be coming.....soon ?
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WAAS performance upgrade ?
