EGNOS Used for Successful Approach Trial at San Sebastian

The European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) was used to guide an aircraft's approach to landing at San Sebastian, Spain, earlier this month.

According to ESA (European Space Agency) News, an Air Nostrum Dash-8 flew four test LPV (localizer performance with vertical guidance) approaches to San Sebastian's Runway 04.

EGNOS is a joint program of the European Space Agency, the European Commission and Eurocontrol. EGNOS is made up of a network of more than forty elements all over Europe that collect, record, correct and improve data from GPS. The modified signals are then relayed via geostationary satellites to user's terminals, offering a positional accuracy of better than two meters, compared with 15 to 20 meters for GPS alone.  In addition, EGNOS gives a guarantee of quality for these signals that GPS doesn't provide.

Similar to the FAA's WAAS (wide area augmentation system), EGNOS offers the possibility of instrument landing approaches similar to ILS (instrument landing system), without the need to install navigation infrastructure at the airport runway.  Furthermore, since the cockpit display is the same as for ILS, there are only very minor familiarization issues for pilots.

The San Sebastian trials were performed as part of the European Commission's GIANT (GNSS (global navigation satellite system) project, which is introducing EGNOS and Galileo services to the aviation market. (Galileo will be Europe's global navigation satellite system.)

The outcome of this flight demonstration will be presented at the European Navigation Conference to be held in Toulouse during April 2008, and at the Second User Forum organized as part of the GIANT project.

GIANT now plans to perform flight demonstrations with an Air Nostrum CRJ-200 aircraft at Valencia (Spain) and Bologna (Italy), before this summer.  02-24-2008.

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