The FAA, industry and DOD are collaborating to evaluate and demonstrate technologies permitting aircraft to land in very low visibilities over a wide range of airports. Called the Synthetic Vision System Technology Demonstration Program, the system concept provides an electronic image of the runway to the pilot on a head-up display with an overlay on the display of symbology providing all the navigation and performance information needed to fly and land the aircraft. The system concept and supporting technologies may have the potential to substantially improve the safety and reliability of landing and taking off in very low visibilities at far more airports than is possible today,

If you are like many people, you scan the newspaper, television, or Internet every morning and check out the latest weather map and forecast to see how it may affect what you plan to do that day. If you depend on satellites to do your business and you want to know how the “weather” in space might affect those satellites, you are not so lucky—at least not yet. “Space weather” is a relatively new phrase in space physics. It refers broadly to the conditions in space that may affect human activities. Those conditions are changing all the time. Differing types and intensities of solar activity produce different conditions in the solar wind, which in turn impact the conditions in the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and upper atmosphere. Adverse space weather conditions include increased ionospheric scintillation, which disrupts communications and navigation signals, electrical charging of spacecraft surfaces that can produce arcing, and radiation damage from energetic protons and electrons that can damage spacecraft components.

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