The Wind Shear Project

The goal of this project was to produce an inexpensive yet highly reliable system for detecting wind shear at small and improvised airfields. A small demonstration system consisting of five nodes was produced and tested both on campus and at a local airport.

A longer paper on this project is available at the link below. For copyright reasons, it may not be reproduced in its entirety, not even by the authors.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6187319&tag=1

Wind shear has proven to be such a serious problem for aviation that authorities in the USA and other countries have mandated wind shear detection systems for air transport operations. Unfortunately for large segments of the aviation community, only the largest airliner-served airports have this life-saving capability. The vast majority of places where aircraft land, whether busy feeder and relief airports, small-town general aviation airports, backcountry airfields or improvised landing areas used by  military and disaster relief operations do not now and never will have the multi-million dollar high-maintenance systems that protect the major airliner operations. The objective of this project is to provide a highly-reliable yet inexpensive and easily deployed system for giving small operators the same sort of information that has proven to be life-saving in well-funded air transport operations.

The project as developed uses a redundant array of inexpensive sensors (RAIS) arranged in a partial mesh network to cover as much ground as the number of sensor nodes permit. For the demonstration project, only five nodes were available, which is too small to protect even a small airport like Whiteman Field. However, even with the low-power XO computers used, the architecture would support 100+ nodes. More computing power would allow coverage of a greater geographical area.

RAIS topology. Nodes connect to as many other nodes as are in range. Multi-hopping allows data transfer between nodes that cannot connect directly to each other. The tower node also connects to as many machines that are in its range. Nodes on the approach path, not shown, would provide the most critical data to a landing aircraft.

Bhuiyan Muhaimeen configuring a node on campus

Civil Air Patrol cadets testing the system on Whiteman Field near Los Angeles

Civil Air Patrol Cadet Rivera discovering the maximum range for a node on Whiteman Field