Tutorial
Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS)
SATS (Small Aircraft Transportation System) is a proposal of the NASA Aerospace Technology Enterprise. This
plan seeks to develop technology that will provide a new framework for the national transportation system. SATS
is conceived to be a safe travel alternative, freeing people and products from existing transportation system delays
by creating access to more communities in less time.
The vision for SATS is bold. As a first step, NASA has proposed a research initiative to prove that the SATS concept will work. The research would culminate in an integrated technology demonstration of the futuristic system. Based upon that demonstration, decisions could be made to invest more resources toward this innovation. Through such a demonstration, NASA hopes to prove that emerging technologies enable innovations in airspace operations and architecture.
The SATS concept is based on a new generation of affordable small aircraft as computer-based "clients" on an airborne "internet." Each would operate within a system of small airports serving thousands of suburban, rural and remote communities. The SATS concept makes greater use of small aircraft for personal and business transportation. SATS should be able to do this by increasing the supply of smaller aircraft for "flight-on-demand" and for use in "point-to-point" direct travel between smaller aviation facilities (such as regional airports, general aviation and other landing facilities including heliports).
The SATS architecture will attempt to incorporate near-all-weather access (an advanced, on-board weather data collection system) to any landing facilities in the U.S. SATS would leverage Internet communications technologies for travel planning, scheduling, and optimizing destination services. SATS research is intended to create the possibility of using landing facilities that would not require control towers or radar surveillance. The SATS architecture would be created to operate within the National Airspace System (NAS), but in a more automated manner among the 5,000 or so existing public-use landing facilities (scheduled air carriers serve only about 660 of these facilities). With a total of over 18,000 of these smaller landing facilities serving vast numbers of communities in the United States, ultimately, all of these facilities could employ SATS operating capabilities.
NASA investments in Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments (AGATE) and General Aviation Propulsion (GAP) technologies have led to the emergence of a new generation of small aircraft. These new aircraft will possess near-all-weather operating capabilities and will be compatible with the modernization of the National Airspace System. The new aircraft will incorporate state-of-the-art advancements in avionics, airframes, engines, and advanced pilot training technologies.
These new aircraft, however, will not make the SATS vision for transportation available to the general public unless new concepts for airspace architecture and operations can be developed. Emerging technologies can be developed now to create the next major innovation in the way Americans travel, in the way our products are delivered, and in the way our services are transported.
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