The Airplane Anti-collision Systems should provide reliable real-time information to trigger alarm in case of unexpected obstacles close to the plane location. The flight most critical periods are during the take-offs and touch-downs and put lot of constraint on pilot to seek and avoid any obstacles with minimum or rather non delays. Given the possibility of emergency landing in new location(s), unknown environment, unexpected weather patters causing limited vision, obstacles, may put plane in danger. How to employ the Radar technology in support of safe flight?
Eduard, in your question you are specifically focusing on radar to avoid obstacles. Personally I don't see a big future for radar as a technology to serve that purpose. It is more likely that enhanced or synthetic vision systems based on laser and other electro-optical systems in combination with highly detailed terrain data basis will provide better cues to aircrews.
Obviously, this is only the 'front end' of collision avoidance as it generates inputs regarding the presence of obstacles. The next level is the integration with the Flight Management System to determine the optimal flight path for avoiding these obstacles. Depending on the stage of flight (e.g. engine failure during take off), the FMS will determine viable flight paths for an emergency landing etc.
Radar is also able to provide information about objects ahead of the aircraft but for high resolution imaging purposes you need extremely high radar frequencies (high-end GHz) which brings a whole slew of challenges in practical environments.
Hope this helps, feel free to ping me if you like to discuss further,
Greetz,
Rene
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