The use of multilateration has been growing globally in recent years. Interestingly, the very nature of multilateration deployments around the world, their various applications and characteristics, underscores the tremendous flexibility of the technology.

This section highlights some unique worldwide applications of multilateration, and discusses the specific requirements of each that the system has successfully addressed. This is followed by a description of the certification process used in vthese applications to assure that the performance and safety levels traditionally applied to secondary radar are met, and in many areas exceeded, by multilateration surveillance systems.

Currently, aviation’s Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems are gradually transitioning from the traditional approach of specifying the precise technical characteristics of individual systems to a “performance-based” standard applicable to all systems in each of the three CNS groups. Under this new certification approach to surveillance, for example, multilateration and secondary radar — which are very different technically — would be required to meet identical levels of performance.

The global adoption of multilateration is illustrated in the map above with highlighted countries deploying multilateration systems across six continents.