scope:

Introduction

Navigation in civil airspace is facing new challenges. As air traffic grows constantly, the separation between aircraft must be drastically reduced, hence requiring higher performances of the navigation systems. The International civil aviation is pursuing three major initiatives to modernize air navigation:

1. Required Navigation Performance (RNP).

2. Exploitation of the capabilities of satellite navigation under the rubric of "Global Navigation Satellite System" (GNSS).

3. Enhancement of Area Navigation (RNAV) based on RNP compliant aircraft.

These three air navigation initiatives join together with other aviation programs to enable a new paradigm - one of the most popular being "Communications, Navigation, Surveillance / Air Traffic Management" (CNS/ATM).

One of the main revolutions that will come from these initiatives is that the requirement will no longer be hardware based (mandatory equipage) but performance based.