For GLONASS to be seriously useful, the resolutions of the Ministry of Transport alone are clearly not enough

The head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, Alexander Neradko, in a letter to the government of the Russian Federation, said that GLONASS equipment, which, according to the order of the Ministry of Transport, should be equipped with all Russian aircraft, does not bring any benefit. This statement may seem unexpected, but it only voices a fact that has long been known to specialists: the decision to install GLONASS systems was purely political. Technical reasons for the introduction of satellite navigation systems on board aircraft in our country are still a little more than completely absent.

The Izvestia newspaper, which obtained Neradko's letter, points out that for small airlines such an order could be simply ruinous. It is for small vessels that the order provides for the priority installation of GLONASS equipment (before January 1, 2015), but the cost of the system, together with the installation, can be comparable to the residual value of the vessel itself. In addition, the installation forces the aircraft to be withdrawn from circulation for a month or more, which in itself may well lead the company that owns two or three aircraft to bankruptcy.

But the most important thing, of course, is that expensive satellite navigation systems on aircraft are simply unnecessary. The range of action of conventional ground-based radar systems, which are equipped with almost all airfields in the world, is about 500 kilometers, which is enough to cover all areas of the Earth where ordinary air routes flow. Equipment for these systems - both ground and airborne - in various versions is included in the standard equipment of airfields and aircraft, standard instructions have been developed for it, confirmed by decades of aviation experience.

And for satellite navigation systems GNSS (this designation is used when not only GPS is meant), such experience has not yet been accumulated. There are also not enough airports equipped with ground equipment, without which the use of GNSS systems on board becomes completely meaningless. In 2009, the disappearance of an Air France jet carrying 228 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean, out of range of aviation radar, set the industry on fire and thinking about satellite systems. But only recently, in February 2012 - later than the Russian Ministry of Transport! - The US Congress passed a law on equipping civil aviation aircraft with a GPS system.

It is believed that now 2.5 thousand civil airfields in the United States are equipped with appropriate equipment out of a total of about 13 thousand - that is, about 20%. And this is clearly not enough for American airlines, having rolled up their sleeves, rushed to change their usual and used radar equipment for a satellite pig in a poke. The initiative of the Congress, of course, will speed up this process, but it is clearly not worth waiting for a complete transition to satellite systems in the near future.

The reader, of course, guessed what I was leading to. In Russia, there are a couple of orders of magnitude fewer airfields than in the United States - 236. You can understand how satellite navigation equipment is being introduced to them from the report of the Collegium of the Federal Air Transport Agency “On the results of the work of the Federal Air Transport Agency in 2011 and the main tasks for 2012 ". I quote: “ As part of the implementation of the FTP “ Global Navigation System” in 2011, 20 civil aviation airports are equipped with GLONASS (GBAS) ground-based functional additions, which allow for aircraft approach using satellite navigation system signals. Thus, the total number of installed products has become 37 units, but the problem with their commissioning remains unresolved, due to the lack of the necessary flight control equipment .

As Anatoly Vladimirovich Lipin, Associate Professor of St. Petersburg State University of Civil Aviation, points out in the Aviaglobus magazine, it is economically very justified to introduce satellite approach systems at small airports, where radar facilities of a sufficient level turn out to be too expensive. But just among these same "37 units" for some reason, not a single such airfield is listed. As a result, Russian air carriers are completely deprived of the incentive to upgrade, and the imposed GLONASS facilities are absolutely useless.

There is, however, one area where Russian pilots have been using satellite navigation for a long time and with pleasure: these are flights in sparsely populated areas of the Far North and Siberia. But the systems for this task, although they bear the proud name of "aviation", differ from ordinary car navigators except perhaps in some specifics and level of performance. In order for GLONASS to be seriously useful in this area, some formidable decrees of the Ministry of Transport are clearly not enough.