Search Mon Oct 24 2016
System of the future now a fading memory
Project requested by NASA was never built
By Eric Anderson |
Niskayuna
The satellite tracking system promised to prevent midair collisions, alert pilots to other dangers and direct rescuers to aircraft in trouble by pinpointing a plane's location anywhere on the globe to within a tenth of a nautical mile, by some accounts.
And it was being developed at General Electric Co.'s research laboratories in Niskayuna. Could the system have helped locate the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet that disappeared earlier this month? Perhaps.
It was 50 years ago last month that GE announced the project, developed at the request of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
At the time, GE was heavily involved in the nation's space program, producing satellites, as well as fuel cells for the Gemini program and thousands of parts for the space shuttle.
Later, Earth Observation Satellite Co., which GE owned jointly with Hughes Aircraft Co., produced satellites for the LANDSAT program that mapped the earth.
"GE was doing a lot of satellite work in the 1960s and '70s," said Chris Hunter, the curator who oversees the company's archives at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady.
But the network of 12 pairs of satellites and six ground stations was never built, although elements of it evolved into the network of global positioning satellites that exists today.
The lead scientist behind the GE system, Roy Anderson, developed satellites for air traffic communications and in the mid-1960s worked on a mobile network, Hunter said. The network was a precursor of today's cellular phone system.
In the early 1960s, cockpit-based controls were still fairly simple, and accidents were all too common.
An article in the Times Union of Feb. 27, 1964, told how the satellite system might have been able to prevent accidents like the 1960 crash of two airliners over New York City that killed 134 people.
Later, collision avoidance systems in cockpits largely eliminated such accidents.
GE's network depended on signals transmitted from the ground station to the satellites and relayed to the airplane, and then returned automatically to the ground station. The time elapsed, and the satellites' locations, would permit calculations to fix the plane's location, the Times Union article reported.
The system relied on the plane notifying the nearest of six ground stations of its departure.
Hunter said Friday that the work at GE "sounds like the beginnings of a GPS system. I'm not sure whether this particular system ever went up," he said. "But it sounds like it grew into something else."
Even today, a system of satellites and digital transmissions for air traffic control and routing, called NextGen, is awaiting full deployment nationwide. Hunter said Anderson, the scientist who led the GE effort, died in December 2011.  • 518-454-5323