PLA Air Force develops systems to ensure flight security

The issue of flight security and support has long been a common problem faced by the air force and the civil aviation of every country in the world.

If any tiny foreign body is inhaled into the engine of aircraft, it will lead to unpredictable losses. In the past, the traditional security measure for the airport runway surface is mechanical cleaning and manual inspection, while the avian surveillance, bird-repelling and anti-bird measures are mainly depending on huge-crowd tactics with prevalent lack of effective technical means and methods.

A department under the Air Force of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has addressed the issue of the two "enemies" for aviation force, and successfully developed the airport runway foreign-body detection system and the avian surveillance and repelling system after three years' research.

Through experimental tests, the primary performance indexes of the new systems have both proven to exceed the technical levels of similar domestic and foreign products.

To better improve the effects of night-time monitoring, the scientific research personnel of the department utilized such advanced technologies as near infrared auxiliary lighting and low-light level imaging in their 200-plus times of tests and eventually made new breakthroughs in such aspects as automatic scanning, automatic identification, automatic alarm and precise positioning to ensure further enhancement of the efficiency and reliability.

Bird collision has been identified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) to be the A-class aviation disaster.

The new avian surveillance system developed by the scientific research team of the department has overcome a number of key technologies such as the high-speed scanning image stabilization technology, target monitoring in complex scenes, and so on, and realized the integration of image mosaic, target identification and avian alarm, which has readily resolved the problems of automatic day-and-night monitoring and proactive repelling timely.