Airway Stop & Go

The faster airplanes fly, the more traffic congestion they can cause on the airways. Last week Canada's Department of Transport, looking forward to the time when jetliners will be sweeping across the continent at better than 500 m.p.h., contracted with Raytheon Manufacturing Co. for $5,000,000 worth of long-range radars for 15 major Canadian airports from Moncton, N.B. to Vancouver. When the system is in operation in 1958, it will keep the headlong jets from 1) treading on each other's heels, 2) overrunning the slower, propeller-driven craft (see map).

Raytheon's airway radars, which have revolving antennas 40 ft. wide, are modeled after equipment used in military air-warning networks. Raytheon engineers are confident that they can track large commercial airliners, flying 70,000 ft. up, 200 miles away. When rain clouds cut off the view of a distant airliner, the radar can switch to a special "circularly polarized" wave that is reflected differently by spherical raindrops and the metal surfaces of wings and fuselage. This gimmick makes an airliner visible even behind a rain cloud. Another gimmick makes the radar blind to all objects that are not moving, such as mountain peaks.

Canada's air authorities believe that the new system will permit the accurate scheduling of jet air traffic. Jetliners use so much fuel while flying slowly that they cannot hang around an airport waiting for a chance to land. The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Administration has not contracted so far for a complete long-ranch system, but the President's budget calls for radar control of air traffic in the congested triangle bounded by Chicago, Boston and Norfolk, Va.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.