Honeywell Radar That Sees Thunderstorms in 3D New Technology to Make Debut on A380
Pilots of Airbus Industrie's A380 Superjumbo will have a new Honeywell RDR-4000 weather radar that automatically scans more than 1.5 million cubic miles of atmosphere in moments, looking for storm ‘tumors' that could imperil the aircraft.
The new radar is slated for certification in early 2005, and it's making its public debut here at Farnborough. It represents the first major technological breakthrough in civil aircraft weather radar technology since Arinc 708 all solid-state radars were introduced more than two decades ago, according to Stephen Hammack, a technical marketing manager at Honeywell Aerospace.
"RDR-4000 has volumetric scanning, automatically looking at all the airspace 90° either side of the nose, from the ground to 60,000 feet, out as far as 320 miles ahead of the aircraft. With this new radar, all the returns are stored in a computer buffer as a 3D model," Hammack told ShowNews. The model is updated every several seconds as the radar completes a new 3D scan cycle. Pulse compression and a very low-noise, coherent-frequency receiver provide unprecedented weather detection range.
To filter out ground clutter, RDR-4000 has its own terrain database, adapted and scaled-down from Honeywell's Enhanced GPWS. This radar is ‘smart' enough to look for relevant hazardous weather along the vertical and horizontal flight plan route programmed into the A380's FMCS, anticipating storm threats along the climb and descent, waypoint-to-waypoint route. Other features include predicted windshear detection, Doppler turbulence detection and cloud temperature/moisture content compensation.
The RDR-4000 also has been selected for a fleet-wide retrofit by American Airlines and for the USAF's C-17 fleet. It's also able to use antenna dishes as small as 12 inches diameter, making it ideal for business aircraft applications.
