Hakan Lans

Think back to Italy’s worst aviation disaster, at Milan’s Linate airport, in October 2001, when an SAS MD-87 jet taking off in thick fog and rain at 170 mph slammed into a . business Cessna taxi-ing on the wrong runway, the SAS jet lost its right engine and killed the four occupants of the smaller jet instantly.
The bigger plane then managed to take off, reaching a height of 12m; but because the remaining engine had ingested debris from the crash, reducing its thrust, the plane came down on to its destroyed landing gear and careered into a baggage handling hangar at 150mph, killing all 118 people on board. Four Italian ground personnel also died. Pilot Jonas Gustafsson’s manoeuvring of the controls was considered so skilful the sequence of his actions are now held up as an example in the SAS training manual.

Had the aircraft been able to see each other - in fog-proof electronic real-time on a cockpit computer screen, and not rely on radio instructions from a negligent control tower, the accident would surely have been avoided. In fact such a system had, in 2001, been up and running for five years, designed by Hakan Lans, often regarded as Sweden’s top inventor in the 20th century.
Yet in 2007, six years after Linate, there is still no progress in bringing his STDMA system on to the global aviation market. It's cheap to install and run; and allows planes to see each other whether in the ground or in the sky, regardless of clouds and weather - and even see ground vehicles. It's even an International civil aviation organisation (ICAO) standard, but it's a standard is only as good as the uptake of the system is broad.
And at the moment, use is compulsory only over Swedish and Russian airspace. Reason. "Nothing to do with its merits, it's excellent. But industry lobbying," says Bo Redeborn, director of Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic controllers across Europe.
Many who work in creative endeavour including science will have empathised with Lans. You spend fifteen years in a lab or garret perfecting your brilliant idea only to find it dumped because it is, how shall one put it, ahead of its time, attracting the ire of if not luddites then lobbyists. .
How does the Lans system work? Well, let’s look first at how the current system radar works. A rotating transmission antenna, using lots of electricity and spectrum, pumps out high energy pulses into the sky and picks up echoes from aircraft which are painted by the beams. It’s slow, taking up to half a minute for stressed ground controllers to give a reading from a screen full of dots over scratchy radios: it requires aircraft to cooperate, identify themselves and fly at a reasonably high altitude. It’s also not so accurate.

In contrast, Lans's system is a GPS "crystal ball", showing the location, direction of flight, call sigh of up 9,000 other craft in the sky, overlaid on a colour map of the region. Its astonishing system that allows free flight, allowing aircraft to negotiate with each other on a peer to peer basis, to figure out potential hazards and avoid them, as pilots routinely do in good weather by using their eyes and brains. Bypasing the thirty seconds It takes for air traffic control to get a radar reading means that the current safety buffers between planes In the air - several miles - can be reduced, allowing more landings and take offs - and therefore less need to expand to extra runways. Another consequence Is safety spacing: air traffic control requires airlines to stick to certain highways In the sky, which keeps aircraft separated vertically and horiztonally but Is rarely the most direct route. Unlikemotorists, pilots must fule a flight plan and stick to it, unless authorised otherwise by their controllers. Airlines cannot in most cases take the direct route and avoid air traffic snarlups, leading to more congestion. Lans's system changes all that.

The system works by aircraft transmitting their own details, taken from readings from four satellites, and using his STDMA (Self organising Time Division Multiple Access) algorithm to divide transmissions into little packets or slots which ensures that, while information is sent out on the same frequency –necessarily so- only one aircraft is ever transmitting at any one time, also necessary, to avoid interference.
The genius of his algorithm is that it is self-organising, without the need for base stations, a process that is registered and worked out by a computer program existing in all aircraft. The craft would continually change time slots and inform others which time slot they would occupy next: His algorithm applied in onboard computers didn’t choose the best time slot, which would mean that two aircraft equidistant from a third would get the same time slot even if very close. Instead the inventor saw to that the algorithm gave a range of choices, then let a randomiser take the actual slot. This is endlessly repeated to give positions to other craft at short notice.

Aviation expert professor Eli Noam, director of the Columbia University Institute for Tele-information, argues that GPS navigation is so far superior to radar he even advises closing the stations to free up bandwidth for other purposes.
Others wouldn’t go as far. Redeborn of Eurocontrol says “We need GPS regardless of what happens to radar, in fact
For national security reasons, the military will continue to use it.”
So why the holdups?
Redeborn says:"Industry and other actors in aviation spread
disinformation because they have commercial and national interests to protect." Not only the radar industry, with its multibillion-dollar investments in equipment. He includes the US Federal Aviation Administration. "They haven't been supportive at all." As well as others.
The disinformation they spread is something supporters of Lans’s system such as Redeborn often have to deal with. A common criticism is that the system lacks "integrity", that it is not secure enough from prying and dangerous eyes. In the past aircraft position was a secret known only to air traffic controllers hunched over their radar monitors. Now, the story goes, anyone, for instance a terrorist, can buy a receiver and software costing a few hundred pounds and sit in their bedsit watching real-time a map of the world's aircraft movements. True? Wrong, says Redeborn, STDMA allows advanced encryption:
"Every time we answer an argument," says Redeborn, "the lobbyists come up with a new objection, ever more trivial. Probably more money has been spent in disinformation than on developing the system, in the first place."
In truth as Redeborn well knows, it is nothing to with about efficacy or fairness; everything to do with politics. Lans’s system was never going to be implemented as the standard in aircraft in the United States even if the radar industry were to greenlight GPS, because Lans is, to put it bluntly, not American.
While Lans patented his system in 1996, and has been successfully stalled since in the international aviation industry, the US is now developing a parallel system, UAT, which it expects to roll out by 2020; even then its inferior to Lans's invention, as it lacks "SMS" capacity between aircraft and ground control, which permit written take off commands and could avoid the misunderstandings in spoken commands. Never mind: the American political-industrial complex has come to some kind of mutually satisfactory agreement. Even though for many American enterprises it’s years too late: as long ago as 1999 the American branch of UPS, the parcel service, which had installed Lans’s transponders on its own fleet was complaining that that the FAA was not demanding it as standard on all aircraft.
In Europe, perhaps because it’s less corrupted, and things are at least supposed to be judged on merit, there is precisely for that reason less movement. STDMA is clearly a system that works. (It's been tested for 150,000 flight hours, and something very similar Is the worldwide standard on ships.) But, Redeborn says: .
"Sweden is a small country with not much clout, but the government also doesn't have a tradition of intervention and flying the flag on behalf of its business and research community. Unlike France, Germany, Italy and to some extent the UK -as we see now over the squabbles with who gets what in Galileo."
So, this is how it goes in the DG transport conference rooms, in the free-for-all of shifting alliances where national and industrial interests are pitted against and with each other, and a cheap and revolutionary system from an individual inventor from a small albeit innovative country already in existence that earns none of other big players any money stands less chance. Only its evident excellence prevents the last rites being read over it; and the deadlock being broken up, with some other air navigation system getting the European go-ahead. Eventually.
Something for the reader to think about the next time he steps on a plane and gazes through the window at a fogbound runway.