A first look at ICARUS Vertical Alert Service

What does the Vertical Alert Service do?

The VALS performs live analyses of known obstacles and Surface Model (DSM) to inform about the “clearance” from obstacles within one minute of the flight (length of the BAR express velocity of an aircraft).

In other words, VALS informs about a potential collision within a minute of flying at a given speed and direction

The data in the white box on the left shows the converted heights. In this particular case, the altitudes were converted from the ellipsoidal height to the barometric heights (relative to QNE and QNH) and relative to the scanned ground surface of the DSM.

Note that the only real-time data source for this example is the aircraft telemetry. Nothing more. Everything else is calculated by the system.