The GBAS protection levels and availability during ionospheric irregularity occurrence

Abstract

The next generation aeronautical navigation system utilizes the Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) based equipment to aid aircrafts during approaching and landing. The Ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) broadcasts the augmentation information to the aircrafts in order to compensate for the GNSS signal-in-space errors and provides the accuracy, integrity, continuity and availability of system. The protection level is a parameter in the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) GBAS standard which validates the availability of system. The ICAO SARPs's algorithms are applied in this paper to compute the GBAS protection levels. We use the GNSS data recorded at the Suvarnnahumi international airport (AERO) in 2014. The results show statistics of days with ionospheric irregularity in 2014 as well as the protection levels during ionospheric irregularity occurrences. The average of the availability in March (equinox) is 99.30% and July (solstice) is 99.93% at the altitude of 100 feet. But the average availability of September (equinox) is 99.98%. So, that will be another reason that reduce the availability unless the ionospheric irregularity.