“And from that minor difference, it will do calculations and it can send out corrected messages to aircraft.” A plane lands at San Francisco International Airport on Thursday, July 27, 2023, in San Francisco, Calif. It’s saying: ‘I know exactly where I am, where do you think I am?’,” said Yakel. “This transmitter talks to nearby satellites. It is already being used at Newark and Houston airports. The new tool - a transmitter at a ground station, near the intersection of four runways on the edge of the bay - helps solve this problem by sending out location information that provides corrections to satellite-based GPS signals. “For the precision that we need for aviation – it’s not good enough,” he said. While satellite-based GPS is accurate enough for everyday use, it has minor errors due to atmospheric conditions, satellite distribution and other issues, he said. With three international airports, the Bay Area has crowded skies, said Yakel. “There have been times where the planes were so low and so strong that I once woke up thinking there was an earthquake, because my house is shaking,” she said.īut it’s risky to reroute planes using today’s constellation of GPS satellites. I can’t enjoy my backyard the way I used to. “It makes a very big difference.”įor Karen Schilling Gould, a 30-year resident of Palo Alto, “the noise is incessant. “Now you have a lot more planes, doing a lot more things, that are closer to you,” said Landesmann. Planes also have changed their braking techniques, which adds to the noise problem, the group found. They confirmed the sudden concentration of flights - and a significant drop in altitudes. To prove there was a problem, Palo Alto’s Jennifer Landesmann and her group Sky Posse filed a massive FAA data request under the Freedom of Information Act. Homes were bombarded with noise, said Palo Alto Councilman Greg Tanaka. Air traffic that had been dispersed was suddenly focused on a single corridor. That changed the flight paths in 12 metropolitan areas, including San Francisco. Then, in 2014, the FAA’s $35.6 billion modernization effort put GPS navigational satellites in orbit to make airplanes more fuel efficient and increase the capacity of routes in the sky. Until recently, most airports relied on the traditional instrument landing system to determine whether an aircraft is off-center or approaching the runway too high or too low. “We’re hoping that this is a system that can offer some relief to nearby communities,” Yakel said.Īs passenger levels have grown over the years, the national airspace has been under increasing strain to both keep up and do it safely. The goal is to enable steeper glide paths or even curved or offset approaches to keep the noise of incoming air traffic farther away from the Peninsula’s most-populated neighborhoods. Descent routes haven’t changed yet, but several new approaches are awaiting federal approval. “The broadcasted messages are giving ‘digital breadcrumbs’ to aircraft to follow a pathway into SFO.” In the tight airspace of the Bay Area, “this enables landing patterns that wouldn’t be possible using less precise navigational aids,” said SFO spokesman Doug Yakel. A broadcast transmitter at San Francisco International Airport is part of a new aircraft positioning and landing technology, called the Ground-Based Augmentation System (GBAS), designed to reduce noise over Peninsula communities.(Photo courtesy of San Francisco International Airport) The $11 million project - the first in the West - improves a plane’s three-dimensional positional accuracy from many hundreds of feet to an exacting 30 to 50 feet. Now the airport is testing a new way to battle the nuisance that is growing worse in many nearby cities: Precision navigation.Ī powerful GPS transmitter on the airport’s tarmac will guide incoming planes with more accuracy than satellites in the sky alone, so pilots can fly higher over cities or soar out into the Bay, potentially reducing noise over Peninsula communities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park. For years, neighbors who live along the flight path to San Francisco International Airport have suffered - and complained - about airplane noise.
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