LANDING APPROACH SURVEILLANCE AND WARNING

LASAW
Remote Airports

Advance warning and proximity alerts for mistaken, unscheduled or emergency incoming aircraft. AI interprets landing intentions to give your ground crew a few crucial minutes - or hours - to respond.

what can LASAW do for your airport operation?

The acronym LASAW stands for “Landing Approach Surveillance And Warning”. A combined hardware-software solution, the system uses a small on-the-ground ADS-B receiver to pick up all aircraft flight behaviours within range at twice per second. This data is then analysed to determine if it meets certain landing criteria and characteristics indicating it’s preparing to land or will stray into restricted airspace A warning event is generated with Audio and onscreen warnings and dedicated digital outputs can also be configured to raise alert status with third-party systems.

LASAW team - EMERGENCY SQUAwk code detection

Giving aerodrome operators precious extra time to respond to a nearby aircraft in distress

Every second, LASAW TEAM (Transponder Emergency Alert Manager) interrogates every signal from surveillance area traffic to determine if any emergency transponder codes are being broadcast. If there is such a broadcast for an emergency, hijack, or comms failure, LASAW will:

  • Identify the location and aircraft
  • Provide an alarm and on-screen message
  • Activate on-screen Audio Alerts, mobile messaging alerts to broadcast alarms
  • Enables the ground operator to determine if an emergency may affect their airport and provide sufficient time to react.

LASAW TEAM offers aerodrome operators precious minutes in an emergency return-to-land situation or when an en-route aircraft selects one of their runways for a landing with minimal notice. It adds an early alert notification phase to a potential emergency landing or a no-communications condition that requires special handling and procedures.

TEAM simply gives users more time to react, therefore increasing the scope for preventing an incident from becoming an accident! With more time to react!

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pre-landing alerts & warnings

Observing and modeling aircraft behaviour in real-time to proactively predict landing intentions

In the airspace around an airport runway, the situation is always changing and developing.: Through a thorough understanding of the overall airspace and the known and variable factors within it. From this, you can build an acurate model of the outcomes when the variables shift. This, in essence, is what LASAW does for monitoring and predicting air traffic around a specific aerodrome.

For example, LASAW’s intelligent incursion monitoring is custom-designed for each site. It considers the aircraft’s general direction of approach and random approaches based on speed, altitude, rate of descent, direction, and other nearby landing sites and no-fly zones to ensure precise and reliable alerting.

Through it all, the issues of false alerts are addressed by ensuring aircraft meet highly specific approach configuration criteria before LASAW initiates an alert. This ability to configure and adjust the parameters that LASAW uses to make predictions means it can operate successfully where there are other landing sites within the unusual alert threshold of 1NM. All approach configurations are customisable and able to be fine-tuned for maximum alert timeframes.

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surveillance for unscheduled runway approach

Proactive detection backed by customised automated alerts and escalation protocols, everything from discrete text messages to firefighting system deployment

It’s well known in the industry that planes approach and even make landings without proper clearances from airfield controllers … or, as happens in the case of remote airfields, without the supposed “operator” ever knowing!

Whether it’s an emergency, pilot error, or simply an operational oversight, when a plane no one expects suddenly lines up, it is a high-risk situation. The chances of mid-air collisions skyrocket, as does the chance of on-the-ground incidents.

Indeed, runway collisions account for two of the top five worst aviation disasters in history. On a far more mundane, though still hazardous level, incoming aircraft often collide with wildlife (especially birds) or clip-parked service vehicles and equipment. Keeping the way clear for scheduled flights is a straightforward case of good communications and operational controls, but what can an airfield operator do when an aircraft they’re unaware of lines up and comes in at over 100 knots? Answering this precise question is the seed from which the entire LASAW solution grew.

Today, LASAW offers the highest possible level of early warning when an aircraft makes an unexpected landing approach. It is just as effective for controlling this risk on a runway-by-runway the basis for major airports as well as for largely unmanned remote airstrips that may only receive one or two flights a month.

LASAW offers this unique capability that can predict pilot intentions against the “landing configuration” required to approach a specific runway. So, do not think of LASAW as a mere “proximity alarm”.

Instead, think of it as a smart system that interprets aircraft behaviour according to three stages of escalation:

  1. LASAW picks up every aircraft when it enters the detection radius (up to 260NM). All aircraft in the range are tracked for type and model, registration, flight number, altitude, rate of descent, speed, and heading.
  2. Each aerodrome has a custom calibrated set of “landing configurations” by which fixed-wing aircraft of varying performance capabilities can approach by. LASAW constantly scans to see if any aircraft is entering one of these configurations. If there is a match and the aircraft is not scheduled, the system can initiate a hierarchy of warnings, giving ops teams time to take action.
  3. If the unexpected aircraft continues its landing approach, LASAW can now take emergency action – automatically triggering sirens, initiating emergency notifications, or activating landing lights, strobe lights, automated standby firefighting equipment, or bird scarers.
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LASAW capabilities

The acronym LASAW stands for “Landing Approach Surveillance And Warning”. A combined hardware-software solution, the system uses a small on-the-ground receiver to pick up all aircraft flight behaviours within range. This data is then fed to an ingenious AI that detects which blips display certain characteristics indicating it’s preparing to land or will stray into restricted airspace. When LASAW finds one of these blips, it triggers the alert protocol you choose.

lasaw

“As a rig or land-based safety system, LASAW means ground staff are proactively alerted when there is an aircraft arriving – even if it is not in communication with anyone on the ground.”

- Jon Davis, SkyNet Aviation CEO

Warning Automation you Can Trust

Keeping your equipment, people and landing zones safe.