Flying into Chicago's O'Hare International Airport just got even stranger. Air traffic controllers are struggling to cope with "Ghost Planes" that keep appearing on their radar scopes.
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It would be interesting to see if any of the "ghost plane" radar tracks match that of "real planes". Radar is a relatively tight beam, and with the energy levels output by a traffic control radome, that beam can bounce around quite a bit.
Sometimes you can get false signals from large bodies of water, as well as clouds, or rain.
Speaking of radar- in this day and age of high-speed communication, wouldn't you think that the radar would be smarter- interrogating signals, using the aircraft's onboard radar and radios to generate signatures to help track objects? I know that they use radio signals to ID the planes- but the signals are set and interpreted by humans...what if the onboard radar on an aircraft pulsed a specific signal back to ground radar when it was swept by the traffic control system?
Posted by: Josh Kirschenbaum | August 12, 2003 at 07:34 AM