Potential troubles with Air safety: In Google or any other search engine enter “near miss” “runway incursion” — you’ll see some hair-raising examples of what concerns me. There’s now a plan for me to generate, with about ten to twelve contributors, an assessment of unresolved issues, for SAE International, within a few months.

Troubles with DoD projects: GAO-08-467SP report from year 2008 gives a detailed description of cost overruns, schedule delays, and inadequate technical performance in the defense industry. Wish I could say things have improved since then. That won’t happen as long as profit is the primary (often the exclusive) goal.

Troubles with preparation within the aerospace industry: An Aerospace Industry Association newsletter from March 2008 was entitled “Aerospace Industry Faces Coming Worker Shortage?” and a recent IEEE communication cited it with these observations: ”Increasing complexity of aerospace products coupled with an anticipated reduced supply of qualified engineering resources has fueled a discourse for some time now among industry executives, academia and professional engineering societies … [reflecting] … emerging anxiety concerning the supply of qualified engineering workforce pipeline and in particular within the aerospace commercial and defense sectors.”

The discussion went on to say the results include military preparedness and far beyond, affecting maintenance of U.S economic competitiveness – and even stability.

Now I’ll switch the subject from problems to solutions. This page begins the solution process by noting a cause-and-effect relation between the last item just listed and each of the other three. In a nutshell, what I’m offering is information contributing to solutions. High priority is given to this because of obligations toward

* our defense industry — to minimize risk faced by troops put in harm’s way, halfway across the planet

* our transportation industry toward passenger safety (e.g., in flight and for ships on the high seas).

For the immediate present, I’ll begin by providing PDFs that can be viewed from this site, including

* over 100 pages from my 2007 book simply by subscribing to my mailing list by clicking here.

* some of my recent Institute-of-Navigation manuscripts.

More will follow — much more. In addition, I cite a 90-minute tutorial that introduces GPS/GNSS and inertial navigation, free to all ION members.

A final word: We’re not just talking about modest gains in performance here. In fact, we’re not just talking about doubling or tripling performance either. We’re talking about enormous increases in benefits. Some of the methods advocated have been shown to offer a hundredfold improvement or more. I substantiate that with material on this site (with some available now and some to be added in the future).New Paragraph