Brussels blocking UK from using EGNOS for LPV - and selection of alternates, and LPV versus +V

Who the hell came up with the totally anal principle of “safety of life” for the EGNOS signal…

There is no “safety of life”. Well, no more than with anything else which could kill somebody, and a million things in life could kill somebody. Is the steering wheel shaft in you car certified for “safety of life”?

But some big team of people created a whole certification regime for “safety of life” for the signal.

It is totally artificial. Any old dick with a suitably positioned transmitter can jam it, and where is “safety of life” then? It is total complete artificial bollocks.

Is the US GPS system certified for “safety of life”?

Was the Saturn 5 certified for “safety of life”? No; they just sent up 2 (?) of them and when neither blew up, they stuck some guys in there.

There is no lobby of any significance that will object to the loss of LPV in the UK.

OTOH, I do wonder what rationale was used to justify UK’s involvement in EGNOS originally? To be charitable, they may have seen some use for it, and it certainly could not have been just light GA because the UK simply does not spend money (well, maybe x times £250 and even that is a total CAA ar*se covering exercise to enable drones in Class G without declaring a TDA each time) on light GA. I see two possibilities

• there was a proposed use for EGNOS, not light GA, but for some reason it didn’t materialise in a revenue generating form
• the involvement in EGNOS was presented to the UK as a fait accompli as a part of some bigger EU project

I reckon the 2nd one is more likely, because everybody knows the signal can be received by everybody (within the coverage volume) for free, and if the UK is going to use it, they (as a devoted EU member with loads of money) ought to pay towards it, and the “safety of life” would be a vehicle for doing that which doesn’t look obviously opportunistic. But the “safety of life” thing is applicable only to LPV… so Brussels hung their entire “UK contribution towards EGNOS” coat on the hook of a wide UK commercial deployment of LPV, which as we know never happened, and isn’t ever likely to (no sign of CAT3 LPV, etc). I reckon not even the US has a wide commercial LPV deployment.

Peter, I think unless you have someone providing you a service, you cannot guarantee it’s reliability, and with SoL it would beat the purpose.
DfT/CAA could have signed the agreement and paid the annual fee, but they did not (they can still do it now).
I think I can compare it with the software support for the open-source software – if you don’t pay for support, you can’t have it.
And if you don’t have a support, then you cannot provide any guarantees to you own clients…
So in this case the British government decided that the Safety of Life is too expensive, but designing, launching and commisioning their own satellite constellation is not?! And maintaining it as well would cost money, well above £30M/year.

Graham wrote:

Who would use the LPV approaches enabled by EGNOS? Us? We

Graham, business aviation might, and they will pay, as well as some CAT. The airfields might pay as well, although even if 100 aerodromes paid for half of the service (the other half paid by, say, CAT & NATS), that would be £15M/100=£150K per airfield per year. I think that is too much for a GA aerodrome…

Graham wrote:

We don’t pay, so we don’t count. There is no lobby of any significance that will object to the loss of LPV in the UK.

And I think this statement is half correct. Even when we do pay for service, we still don’t count.
Sometimes GA pays for service which is not provided (enroute charges for 2t+ OCAS).

Peter wrote:

wide UK commercial deployment of LPV, which as we know never happened, and isn’t ever likely to (no sign of CAT3 LPV, etc). I reckon not even the US has a wide commercial LPV deployment.

I’m not sure SBAS is CAT3-capable, it should be GBAS and different hardware. In the US they do use RNP approaches on big planes, see videos by Captain Joe.

Why they called it SoL? I think its supposed to be used everywhere, not just LPV approaches…

I think unless you have someone providing you a service, you cannot guarantee it’s reliability, and with SoL it would beat the purpose.

I think that argument is artificial. The only thing which is guaranteed is death (currently).

I think I can compare it with the software support for the open-source software – if you don’t pay for support, you can’t have it.

You may not get it anyway, if the programmer has vanished At work, we pay for software for interfacing to HMRC for filing VAT returns. The guy has just said he is stopping it because he doesn’t make enough.

Practically, in software, people tend to move on when they find something more interesting or profitable to do, and this is regardless of whether you are paying or not.

So in this case the British government decided that the Safety of Life is too expensive, but designing, launching and commisioning their own satellite constellation is not?! And maintaining it as well would cost money, well above £30M/year.

Agreed; it doesn’t make sense. I think this is just a proposal being floated, for some reason. It could be to say to Brussels “we don’t need you”, but everybody will see through such a stunt because anybody in the business can do the costing.

business aviation might, and they will pay, as well as some CAT

I don’t think so; AFAIK there are no UK airports which have LPV but don’t have ILS, there is no CAT2/CAT3 LPV but all the bigger airports have CAT3 ILS. An Easyjet pilot told me they always config the Airbus for CAT3 so if they do nothing on the way down it will land itself. Bizjets are mostly CAT1. The 787 can’t fly LPV, according to one pilot.

Tunisia & Morocco had LPV200 agreements as proof of concept

They prob99 got it for free, as a gesture of how generous the EU is to the poverty-ridden 3rd World. Nowadays you give away vaccines for the same purpose Seriously; this is real. I was a conference years ago where the Eurocontrol official was straight off to Venezuela, to sell them Part M, so they sign up to EASA rather than the FAA.

Why they called it SoL? I think its supposed to be used everywhere, not just LPV approaches…

SoL is just for LPV. Non-LPV GPS approaches, including the +V synthetic glideslope ones, are flown entirely using the US NAVSTAR signal.

There may have been SoL for Galileo also, but that’s too funny since practically nobody is using Galileo…

I’m not sure SBAS is CAT3-capable

Not currently. @ncyankee will know the US situation.

Peter wrote:

Logically, the UK should have paid the (reported – maybe not true?) £30M/year

If that figure is true, then it’s very cheap. At least compared to the cost of creating the UK’s own network. They’d hardly get one sat for that.

But it’s also possible that that is part of the UK’s plan. Build their own space industry. But pumping in large amounts of state aid might fall foul of the withdrawal agreement. But paying UK businesses to develop their own positioning system might achieve the same thing (pumping in money for research & development) but not be state aid.

Maybe the UK wouldn’t have taken it, even if it was free, because it didn’t suit their own plans?

dublinpilot wrote:

If that figure is true, then it’s very cheap. At least compared to the cost of creating the UK’s own network

Yes, a source for that figure would be interesting (haven’s seen anything but rumours. @Peter writes ‘reported’ – where?).

So in this case the British government decided that the Safety of Life is too expensive, but designing, launching and commissioning their own satellite constellation is not?! And maintaining it as well would cost money, well above £30M/year.

Finding an appropriate price is quite difficult. Anyone can ‘freeload’ in the actual GPS constellation, the entire world did that for decades on GPS, and now on Galileo and GLONASS etc.

The annual cost of keeping Galileo and EGNOS operating is of the magnitude of 1 billion Euros per year. As a proportion of that, 35 million Euros is a bargain. But you get everything except SoL for free, nobody will pay that.

In that total, EGNOS is perhaps 10-15%; so 35 million would be around 25-35% of the total EGNOS operating cost. I would not call that a bargain, but also not outrageous, either. Probably about right.

Personally, I think Galileo/EGNOS should simply charge every airport a price for the ‘Safety-of-life service’, and the airport can then decide if it is worth spending money on ILS maintenance and calibration.

Peter wrote:

Was the Saturn 5 certified for “safety of life”?

Yes. NASA had certification standards (as an internal procedure) for manned flights, with an acceptable level of risk defined, and generous “safety factors” built in… in theory. NASA management was convinced they had “five nines” of acceptable risk, meaning the risk of a catastrophic accident was 1 in 100 000. The Challenger launch accident was a result of them defining them incorrectly. Namely, that “the O-ring burnt a third way through” was “a safety factor of three”, while standard engineering practice is “a safety factor of three is when the O-ring starts to burn through only when subjected to three times the maximum stress expected of it”.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report#Role_of_Richard_Feynman

Peter wrote:

Non-LPV GPS approaches, including the +V synthetic glideslope ones, are flown entirely using the US NAVSTAR signal.

I very much doubt that. Since the GPS receiver gets an EGNOS signal for increased accuracy, do you really think it just discards the extra accuracy? That would be daft, wouldn’t it? That is also why you computing RAIM is not legally mandatory if you have an EGNOS-capable receiver within the EGNOS coverage area, even on an LNAV approach; EGNOS will tell you whether the US NAVSTAR signal is reliable, and if it is not, you’ll have a “LOI” annunciation.