Tecnam unveiled a short takeoff and landing (STOL) variant of its twin-engine P2012 Traveller on Friday. The P2012 STOL has a 16.6-meter (54.5-foot) wingspan, 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) wider than the standard P2012, and swaps the Traveller’s Lycoming TEO-540-C1As for Continental GTSIO-520-S engines. At its maximum takeoff weight of 8,113 pounds, the P2012 STOL will offer a takeoff distance of 1,394 feet and landing distance of 1,181 feet, nearly halving the standard Traveller’s takeoff distance of 2,596 feet and landing distance of 2,438 feet.
I can’t help but wonder if they are sorry they cancelled E-Loran which would have had the capability to be almost as accurate as GPS. We will now never know. Our achilles heel is our GPS Satellites. And the Chinese and Russians know it.
Like many aircraft operators I removed the King Loran reciever from my plane to make room for the ADS-B installation. I am thinking the decision to shut down the Loran system was pretty lame. The auto pilot in my aircraft quit working in flight when the system was shut down .The autopilot was coupled to the Loran receiver. More than 200,000 US civilian and military aircraft and boats had Loran receivers… Consider that a single F-22 costs $350 million including developmental and other costs and for the price of of one aircraft, we could have operated the entire LORAN-C system for more than four years. But the Department of Homeland Security ordered the Coast Guard to shut down and demo the LORAN stations back in February 8, 2010 .
So what? Doesn’t the Global Positioning System (GPS) do the same thing and better? It guides unmanned aerial vehicles, tells troops and their supporting arms exactly where they are, synchronizes time and cell-phone antenna, navigates ships. Sure it does, until it fails, or an enemy disables it. Then what do we do? A good answer was to keep a backup LORAN system, and even upgrade it to the enhanced version, e LORAN, which was planned and other countries keep in operation…
Many think that disabling the satellite system that powers the GPS is unlikely because terrorists won’t be blowing a satellite out of the sky.This maybe true, but it’s relatively easy to cripple the GPS without shooting down a satellite because a space system has two other vital segments – the low power up-and-down links and the ground station. The links can be neutralized by electronic assault. North Korea has done this. The ground station is vulnerable to a variety of stoppages, including mundane factors like power outages and even simple human error. The solution of course is to have a backup system in order to prevent the chaos of a disabled GPS – a chaos that could cause a crash of our financial system – a problem that would make the annual $36 million cost of operating LORAN look like peanuts.
Another dollar comparison is in order. The estimated cost to upgrade LORAN-C to LORAN e , which could operate for at least 20 years,was $150 million. The projected cost of eight new GPS satellites is $1.8 billion, in addition to launch and operational costs.
If this minor cost of continuing the LORAN system seems to be a no-brainier, then what happened? Lawrence Husick explains a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism, wrote that the LORAN system “lacked powerful contractors and lobbyist who could profit from Lorans operation and congressional sponsors.These remote radio installations that bring few jobs, and dollars had no support.” In short, he says, “Loran is an orphan.” There is no money to be made by defense contractors. The Coast Guard maintained the system as part of its job description. He adds that February 8, 2010 marked the day the Department of Homeland Security put the entire nation at risk despite the protest from pilots to the FAA.
Conclusion: “It is easy to see how a small system like Loran just got lost in the shuffle of bean-counters trying to cut corners.” The conclusion: We were penny wise and pound foolish. We could spend a few pennies to prevent a navigation melt down one day and it may be coming soon. George Gould pilot @ Galceston Scholes airport KGLS Galveston Texas
Definitely need a backup, but as usual, simple answers won’t satisfactorily resolve the problem. As well as being inherently low rate, less accurate and requiring a fairly extensive worldwide network of easily targeted ground stations, LORAN has the same weakness to jamming as GPS, plus that jamming & spoofing can be done from a distance. Celestial and inertial both have their own weaknesses, so the real answer will be a complementary meld of multiple techniques.
Celestial Nav… imagine that… Back in the days of the ASN-24 and ASN-35 computers on the C-141A, we sure got around the world just fine. The Nav did 3-star fixes and the -24 had a Star Tracker that we never really used. Then, the Delco Carousel 4 had Tacan and DME-DME updating and found those same places very accurately AND we didn’t have the Navigator stealing box lunches! (just kidding about the Nav). In the 747 Classic, the Delco then the Litton 92 were extremely accurate. Could update both from the VOR / DME. On the “tracks”, without updates, the -92 would be within a wingspread width of the aircraft that had GPS before we did.
Loran, GPS, etc, all can be spoofed, flummoxed, or simply jammed. If it is electronic, it can be messed with, period. Thus, for this discussion, only inertial-type systems are relatively safe. They still have to be EMP hardened though.
Long ago, and kind of far away, another pilot, myself, a Navigator, and a Crew Chief, took 3 C-131s (CV-340) across the Pacific (2 west, 1 east) with naught more than DR, Consolan, and a Sextant. Modern systems are wonderfully accurate and useful but the Mark I eyeball and planning will still work.
That’s all well and good for the military, but what about the civilian world? It’s more likely that an adversary would try to disrupt civilian air traffic by jamming GPS.
Any radio-based navigation system can be jammed, but if multiple navigations systems are spread over multiple frequency bands, it makes it more difficult to completely shut down air navigation. And I’m not convinced that the VOR MON will leave enough of a backup. Sure, VORs and LORAN aren’t perfect either, but VOR+LORAN would have left a fairly robust backup system to GPS. It also seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to integrate LORAN and GPS into the same receiver so they can both cross-check each other.
Inertial and celestial navigation are of course naturally resistant to jamming, but they also require every aircraft to be equipped with them. I hope this doesn’t turn into another mandate for GA aircraft.
You are so very correct regarding the waste of not updating LORAN. TLS is another system that was smothered by the pie in the sky promise of GPS. https://www.anpc.com/instrument-landing-systems/ While I am pleased with modern GPS performance, it sure took forever to deliver.
There’s a reasonably cheap and easy answer for most of us (i.e. the US civil aviation sector). I read a paper a few months back on the possibility of using the ADS-B ground stations as a backup RNAV source. If I recall correctly, the ground station signals included the necessary data to do an accurate time-of-flight calculation. You need have to have an accurate timing source onboard (not an atomic clock of your own, just a good digital clock), at least three towers in view, and a modest microcontroller to crunch the numbers.
The team that did the study were able to triangulate a position +/- 20 meters. I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t simply become a standard feature on ADS-B receivers. Here’s a link to the paper: https://navi.ion.org/content/68/2/293
Uhmmm, what exactly is the “new solution for the aviation market after decades?” I believe the Twin Otter (used), Caravan, Kodiak, Dornier 228, Beaver, Helio Courier, and several others have been “making the world`s extreme commercial airports accessible with comfort, safety and style” for some time now (well, the Beaver is debatable on comfort…). While the proposed performance is impressive, for the same price or less, I’ll opt for something that takes Jet A and has greater remote support, thank you.
It would be interesting to put it in context with the aircraft that are already servicing these same airports. How does the performance compare with the Twin Otter, or Islanders, for example? Some of these airports are also served by Caravans–and though it is a single engine, it IS a turboprop.
Interesting that they swapped Lycoming 540s for Continental 520s–do you suppose that has something to do with the need for turbocharging in some parts of the world?
It’s pretty hard to compete with something like the Twatter–turbine reliability, heavy duty fixed gear–large cabin volume, super STOL, great climb gradient. It DEFINES the STOL commuter class. An attempted “replacement” will likely end up being like the “replacement” for the DC-3-companies tried to produce that replacement for over 50 years–the best “replacement” was to simply convert the DC-3 to turbines, and let them soldier on!
They mean it’s a replacement for the Islander. Since they’ve made like 1,300+ of those things, and most are decades old, it’s a great market to target. Avgas (G100UL?) piston puddle jumpers occupy a specific market niche for low operating costs, particularly at lower altitude. Jet A turboprops are great for certain applications, but you will have higher fuel burn and the hardware is more expensive to buy and maintain. Operators of twin piston Cessna, Piper and Islanders could have made the switch to turboprops long ago, instead they just want a new twin piston to replace them.