New technology takes air traffic surveillance to new heights

How do airplanes get “lost”? Don’t we have technology to keep that from happening?

Fortunately, we do now...but this hasn’t always been the case. A Canadian company, NAV CANADA, has just led the development and deployment of the next generation of air traffic surveillance: space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B). This new technology will make it impossible to lose aircraft flying anywhere on Earth. But before we get into that, let’s talk about how we currently track commercial flights.

When you get into a plane and take off from an airport, the location of the plane and the direction your plane is taking is being tracked by a network of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCs). They track you through a variety of surveillance techniques. First, radio waves are pulsed into the air by dishes on the ground; the radio waves bounce off the aircraft and return to the source. This is conventional RADAR. Secondly, commercial aircraft have transponders on board, which broadcast a read-out of pertinent flight data — such as a unique identifier, altitude, and ground speed — to receivers on the ground. Finally, ADS-B allows an aircraft to broadcast its GPS location to receivers on the ground. These techniques can be used in combination or on their own.

Unfortunately, these types of surveillance are completely reliant on ground-based infrastructure, which does not exist in very remote areas or over oceans. When flying in those un-surveilled regions, the location of aircraft is only known when the pilots read out their GPS location to ATCs by voice over high-frequency radios.

In order to fix this problem, Aireon, a company majority-owned by NAV CANADA, has created the first ever space-based ADS-B, which allows aircraft to broadcast their GPS locations to ATCs via satellites, as opposed to via ground-based receivers.

Aireon’s ADS-B technology is aboard each of the 75 Iridium NEXT spacecraft, a network of communication satellites that are evenly spread out around the globe at a height of 780 km. The last of the Iridium NEXT satellites were launched in early 2019, and the Aireon tech is already being used for the busiest oceanic airspace in the world: the trans-atlantic corridor.

This is a major leap forward in air traffic surveillance, and it’s exciting to know that Canada has played a central role in its development.

By Jesse Rogerson

Food guides and policies: Shifting perspectives in Canada

By now, Canadians are getting familiar with the new — albeit slightly controversial — food guide, released earlier this year by Health Canada. Intended to help Canadians make informed choices when it comes to their diet, this new guide eliminates many of the concepts some of us have grown up knowing as tenets of nutrition. Gone are the ideas of portions and food groups; and there’s no more measuring slices of cheese against dominoes. With its divided dinner plate visual, the new food guide is easier to follow and less rigid — and this may be a great thing for overall adoption

Love it or hate it, Canada’s Food Guide brings something new to the table (pun intended!); it takes into account the emotional and social aspects of eating. In fact, at the governmental level in Canada, we are seeing a broadening of the way we think about eating to include not only the functional — nourishing our bodies — but a welcome inclusiveness of the various other aspects of our lives which are so intertwined with food.

This shift in perspective extends over to another governmental agency that has a primordial role in our food system: Agriculture and Agri-food Canada. In June, the department announced Canada’s first food policy – a set of principles meant to guide decisions and actions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, to create a healthier and more sustainable food system. With an investment of $134.4M over five years, the policy has four areas of focus which go far beyond “food production.” With this policy, we see investment in access to healthy food for all Canadians, food security in Northern and Indigenous communities, promotion of Canadian agriculture products, and even food waste reduction.

How this will all unfold is yet to be determined, however, it is interesting to know that the tides are changing when it comes to how we think about food — and this may spark a whole new era for Canada’s food system.

By Renée-Claude Goulet

Looking to read more quirky science nuggets? Check out the July edition of “3 things you should know.”