3. 3-D Views of Air Traffic. Think Star Trek. Imagine if an air traffic controller or air force officer could stand in a room and view all current aircraft, with the projected course, in a three-dimensional visual manner happening all around them as they walked through it. Maybe this is already possible in the defense world (mum is the word), but this would bring a more pragmatic means to view aircraft in flight or on the taxiways. Man is a visual creature, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, a 3-D visualization is worth a gigabyte of data. Imagine if airline operation centers could visualize and manage their fleets in such a manner, and have current weather conditions projected into such a simulation — even Captain Kirk would be impressed. Air traffic management would become an even more interesting career choice.
4. Gaming applications. In the past 20 years, gaming companies have driven the great advances in the visual rendering of animations, flight simulations and realistic graphics. At first, the initial developments focused on the software graphics engines which drove more fluid-like movement by which to attract gamers to ever-more realistic games (if you consider flying into alien worlds, being attacked by mutants of various sizes and fighting with all sorts of interesting weapons realistic). The next set of developments focused on connecting gamers around the world onto Internet-based games in which they compete against one another. How long will it take for one of the in-flight entertainment service providers to team with a gaming company to offer flight-based gaming in which one aircraft’s passengers compete with other flights? ADS-B data from other aircraft (which would be provided by the aircraft’s avionics into the integrated communications suite, which interconnects to an IFE system) could be used in the game (not generating such info, but, simply using it), along with GPS coordinates as part of gaming competition. This is much better than watching old reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond” on a long flight. Your taxpayer dollars could help augment commercial gaming and IFE services which generate tax revenue — so you can qualify your $20
fee for playing “Sky Wars” on that cross-country flight to not only helping justify NextGen, but also in paying down the national debt. How patriotic of you.
5. The Next Great Idea. Can you imagine what some entrepreneur will think of? Imagine how someone thought of sending an image over a very slow, limited telegraph system (and how this eventually spawned fax machines, e-mail, the Web, etc.), or using a land-based wired system to develop a means by which to send wireless signals to a ship at sea. Imagine the number of companies providing any one of thousands of services
OUR FACTORY NEW RA1D2-12 and -13 in tank auxiliary fuel pumps offer several improvements over the original models used in the Beechcraft King Air series.
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