Development and implementation of a three-dimensional aircraft radar user interface for air traffic management

The purpose of this project was to develop and implement a real-time, specialized, air-tracking, radar data visualization that operates on given data sets to provide target direction, transponder tag information, and xy and altitude coordinates. Currently, many air traffic controllers monitor aircraft on a two-dimensional radar system that indicates the aircrafts' xy and altitude information. Such systems require a great deal of intuition in order to visualize the physical positions of the aircraft on the airfield. What is needed is a visualization that projects the aircraft radar data in three dimensions so that air traffic personnel can clearly observe the aircraft positions relative to one another in real-time. The goal of this thesis was to develop such a system, wherein flight position information for an aircraft is taken and mapped to a three-dimensional, animated visualization.