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NASA's prototype AGATE cockpit (above) features touch-screen displays and Pathway-in-the-Sky navigation.

See the AvWeb article below for more information about AGATE and SATS.

NASA: Making GA as Easy and Commonplace as the Automobile?

(This article is from AvWeb: http://www.avweb.com/articles/snf2000/newsb.html)

NASA is relatively well-known throughout civil aviation as playing a supporting role in the
preservation of safety through its Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The ASRS collects, analyzes, and responds to voluntarily submitted aviation safety incident reports in order to lessen the likelihood of aviation accidents. In an agreement worked out with the FAA beginning in 1975, submitting an ASRS report can provide a degree of immunity to the submitter in the case of a violation. In addition to the ASRS program, NASA's research can be found in a variety of aerodynamic improvements to aircraft large and small. Inreasingly, the agency is focusing on doing technology development projects for the transportation industry. In layman's terms, this means high-risk pre-product development, or the kind of high-risk research that manufacturers rarely have the gumption or budget to take on.

Two programs underway within NASA -- dubbed AGATE and SATS -- hold great promise for the future of general aviation, both as we know it and as we, perhaps, would like it to be. These programs have been
ongoing within NASA for a few years. Due to budget constraints, however, neither one has really reached the critical mass their supporters have hoped for and, some would say, have become some of the agency's best-kept secrets. Possibly for the same budgetary reasons, NASA has not exactly promoted them, either. All that may change next year if the boys and girls at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget consent to allow a larger share of the federal pie for them.

The AGATE program, which stands for Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments, is designed to revitalize the existing market for general aviation aircraft and has as its target the $150,000 single-engine, four-place owner-flown airplane. NASA officials point to the Lancair Columbia 300, with its high-tech instrument panel and LCD bringing the computer evolution of the past couple of decades to GA, as the proof-of-concept for certain elements of AGATE. Indeed, another way to think of the AGATE program is that it seeks to migrate
developments in the personal computer industry from the desktop -- or laptop -- into your instrument panel.

But AGATE is just the beginning. Enter SATS, the Small Aircraft Transportation System. SATS is designed to pick up where AGATE leaves off -- instead of the $150,000 airplane, think of the $75,000 airborne transportation system, integrating advances in technologies beyond just computers, to develop a craft that uses high levels of automation to simplify its operation while greatly improving its efficiency and utility. Eventually using technologies like infrared, radar and GPS -- all integrated into a synthetic vision application to aid in navigation and severe weather avoidance -- SATS program managers look for it to result in a "Highway In The Sky" (complete with the unfortunate acronym HITS) type of point-to-point navigation.

If this sounds like the something straight out of the "Jetsons" television program, you're to be forgiven. This evolutionary program -- not revolutionary -- is designed to help simplify aviation, making it affordable, dependable and safer by developing and implementing a type of "cruise control" for aircraft, eventually to include even an autolad capability. Yes, it sounds like a pipe dream, yet NASA's people are determined to make as much of it happen as possible. The bottom line is that some of the stuff NASA is working on today could well end up in your Bonanza in ten years or so. Doubt that? Well, remember that the recently-announced Eclipse Aviation Corp. Eclipse 500 twin-jet is built around SATS technology. This stuff could well be here sooner.