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Piper Aztec Light Twin Engine Aircraft

Our laboratory facilities also include a Piper Aztec airplane, leased from Bedford Associates, Inc., which is located at Hanscom Airfield in Bedford, MA. The Aztec is a light twin engine airplane equipped with state of the art avionics including:

• Bendix/King KLN89B and KLN90B IFR approach certified GPS receivers.
• Shadin AirData Computer
• Prototype Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) receiver and User Interface. This receiver allows our aircraft to fly precision GPS approach procedures currently under development by the FAA.
• FAA Safe Flight 21 Capstone Avionics suite including the UPS Aviation Technology MX-20 multifunction display.
This device functions as a GPS moving map display and can also display uplinked textual/graphical weather data, Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) and Traffic Information Service (TIS) traffic data.
• External data ports for collecting serial air, GPS, and flight technical error data.

Software developed for experiments in our Frasca twin engine simulator can also be run in the airplane for in-flight verification of empirical results. The Aztec has been used for human factors evaluations of C129 GPS receivers, GPS interference data collection, WAAS precision GPS approach demonstrations, and is currently participating in the FAA's Safe Flight 21 Ohio Valley demonstrations of Automatic Dependant Surveillance (ADS-B) technology.

Apollo MX-20 displaying an ADS-B target:

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