The Golze ADL system, now with split-screen SD integration, looks great and very affordable – seems like a bit of a no-brainer for VFR/IMC.
Satellite comms don’t come cheap though. The ADL is probably the cheapest at around €40/month, plus a bit for usage. I don’t believe the VFR community will pay that. After all, “VFR” is supposed to be VMC so there should be no market for delivering weather radar 
Tafs and Metars, yes.
In the US, the delivery of wx data over ADS-B is paid for by the general taxpayer, as a part of a national transport infrastructure policy. We don’t have that in Europe (not for aircraft, at least) so nobody is going to do here what they do in the US.
or to construct a safety case for State (NATS in the UK case) funding
OK Peter, I am tempted to try construct such a safety case, given the AAIB’s reporting of about 17 weather-related GA casualties a year in the UK. If the cost of each is about £2 million, we have a total annual cost of between 30 and 40 million GBP, by the time we add some incidental costs such as police, ambulance, accident investigation and property damage and the carbon footprint of cremation services. If we add the AAIB’s 8 or 9 annual in-flight collision casualties, the total cost may be 50 to 60 million pounds.
If we then estimate that “free” ADSB or similar in-cockpit weather and traffic might reduce the annual tally of corpses by a third, we might, at best, save about £20 million. There may also be quantifiable benefits of live in-cockpit weather in terms of increased utility and utilisation of GA, but that’s more of a subject for one of the students who pop up on EuroGA from time to time looking for ideas or data for a thesis.
On the other side of the balance sheet, the taxman profits significantly from death duties when some of the people who can afford to fly light GA kick the bucket.
In summary, it seems to me that if NATS could broadcast traffic and weather on ADSB for about 10 million quid a year, that might be worth doing. If not, from a taxpayer’s point of view, it’s probably cheaper for us to let those GA participants die.
Peter wrote:
In the US, the delivery of wx data over ADS-B is paid for by the general taxpayer, as a part of a national transport infrastructure policy.
I don’t think that’s entirely true, Peter. One of the Americans on the forum can probably be more specific here, but I believe the US ADS-B wx delivery is paid by the FAA as part of the overall ADS-B infrastructure. Much (most?) of the FAA funding comes from aviation fuel tax amongst other revenue (commercial airline pax taxes??) and only a (small?) part from the general taxpayer.
The aviation trust fund pays for most airport infrastructure on a shared basis with the states. The trust fund gets its funds from two sources, passengers pay a per flight tax collected by the airlines and general aviation pilots pay a per gallon tax collected by the fuel seller. The FAA has a fixed fee contract with Harris to install and operate the 650+ ADS-B ground stations. I don’t know the source of the funds for the installation and operation of ADS-B, but I would expect it comes from the general tax funds and not the aviation trust fund. ADS-B would be in the category of Navigation and Surveillance infrastructure similar to ATC radar and the enroute VOR system.
Thank you NCYankee for this info. I was curious of the cost of such a deployment on a US-wide scale.
A report of Office of Inspector General of the US DOT says :
So I guess an EU-wide deployment would cost nearly the same.
Thanks @Jujupilote, that’s interesting. It seems that the US annual cost over 28 years is less than 130 million Euros, or an average of EUR 4 million per annum for each of the EASA member states. That’s less than the cost of two dead GA participants so it looks like a no-brainer to me.
Harris purchased ITT Exelis which had the FAA ADS-B contract in its portfolio.
I have offered to host a tx station free of charge in a location which would be very helpful for the trial. At present they have short term “testing” licences but hope that OfCom will issue more sensible licences in due course. They said they’d be in touch for the next phase but I have had no further discussions as yet.
If people/Airfields volunteered to host stations the radios/ antennas could be pre-configured. Electricity use for a 25 watt transmitter at 50% efficiency is less than £ 75 per annum. I presume an internet feed would supply the data via VPN or whatever?
I would be happy to host a station permanently if I was allowed a 3 second advert to pop up “sponsored by XYZ Ltd” as this would justify the electricity cost.
Perhaps an advertising based model would work with no government involvement?
If this is to be a long term service which is worth anything, it will need a decent number of transmitters (probably 100+ just for the UK) and then I wonder how the whole thing, not just the data sourcing, is to be funded.
You can get tafs and metars from the USA for free, but with no “service guarantee”, as lots of people have found out many times. If you want “official reliability” you have to pay for the Eurocontrol B2B feed.
If you want wx radar, you can rip it from meteox.com (or some other site, perhaps using a private subscription to a certain service and I can think of two of those) but all these breach the Ts & Cs of the site. So you have to pay for that too.
A partial example of this scenario is the Blitzortung project where each participant puts a lightning receiver in his “back garden” and feeds the data to their server. In return for running that he gets a free sferics feed. I don’t know the details; I know some people here have been involved in it. Someone asked me how hard it is to build the receiver (it was supplied as a kit of components). I would have participated but I live in the shadow of big hills so it would be useless.
To fund it via adverts you would need an app at the client end. It can’t be a website because that needs internet access and if you have that then, ahem, you don’t need any of this
Then somebody has to develop and maintain the app. “Obviously” you would do an IOS one first but then you get protests from android users, and there will be more of those the more you aim at the lower end of the GA market, which is what this service is about because the other end is running one of the other services…
But the bottom line is that at low (VFR) levels you have 3G/4G, or you have it “often enough”. And I reckon at least 95% of VFR flights are so short that they can be briefed adequately pre-flight. The accidents where bad wx (specifically continued VFR flight into IMC) is a factor are usually ones where the forecast of the IMC was blindingly obvious. So I don’t see an operating model in the first place.
